


The Society Pages

by loathlylady



Category: Emperor's Edge - Lindsay Buroker
Genre: F/M, Journalism, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-29
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-17 07:50:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loathlylady/pseuds/loathlylady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Deret can't get the girl, then he <i>will</i> get the story.</p>
<p>Also: Amaranthe and Sicarius on their honeymoon, and Maldynado in party planning mode, as the rest of the group tries to restrain him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Haste to the Wedding](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/13160) by Moldynotgo. 



> A sequel to Moldynotgo's "Haste to the Wedding".

Even with her eyes open, Amaranthe wasn’t certain she was actually awake. This was partly because the room was just as dark with her eyes shut, but mostly because pressed along her back was a familiar muscled form. She had felt it against her often enough during training, as Sicarius demonstrated the many ways in which someone might kill her, but neither of them were particularly clothed at the moment, which was a first. Naked in the same bed with Sicarius was a frequent dream of hers, though usually they were a great deal more . . . _active_. His arm was currently draped across her waist, limiting the prospect of movement. Cuddling was a new variation in her dream life. Not a disappointing one, but definitely new.

She was just preparing herself to enjoy the dream for what it was while it lasted, when the first memories of the previous evening came trickling back. Infiltrating the office on the third floor of the licensing hall with Sicarius. Signing the marriage license. Listening to his rather incredible speech and declaration of love, which had come before getting married, but was possibly the most dreamlike element of all. The knowledge of it was stupendous and welcome, but her desire to have him return her affection had been so great in the past months that she doubted the truth of the memory almost reflexively.

Coming home to his hole had been somewhat less dreamlike, so it was probably all true.

But just to be sure, she pinched her own arm and then flinched. It hurt. It hurt a lot. After all she had been through, greeting the morning with a solid pinch was still really painful, and, she assumed, evidence she was really, truly awake. Tears sprang to her eyes, and not from the pinch. 

“What are you doing?”

Sicarius’s breath whispered across her neck as he spoke, raising the fine hairs on her body. His voice was amused and rough with sleep, which was also new — and pleasant. This could still be a dream.

Amaranthe turned over carefully within the circle of his arms, hoping she could manage not to push either one of them out of the narrow pallet. They definitely needed a real bed, or at least his and hers bedrolls. Maybe they could get them monogrammed.

“Trying to figure out whether this is all a dream or not,” she whispered back, in case speaking at a normal volume would make it all disappear. 

“To what purpose does pinching yourself serve this?” he asked, and Amaranthe was tempted to touch his face to see exactly how far up his eyebrow was as he said it.

“Supposedly it doesn’t hurt if you’re dreaming, but it was pretty unpleasant when I did it.”

“Huh.” His hand drifted lower, pulling her against him, and just as she was thinking that _this_ was where reality ended, Sicarius tweaked her on the rump.

“Hey!” she yelped. So much for speaking quietly. “What was that for?”

“I was helping you to test your hypothesis.” If she didn’t know better, she would swear that his whole body was smiling. Smugly. He smoothed his hand over the piece of her anatomy he had just offended, and she held off a shiver. “Are you dreaming?”

“At this point, I’m fairly certain the dream is over.”

He snorted softly and rested his forehead against hers.

“Was it a good dream?” He sounded slightly uncertain, as if there were a possibility she would say it wasn’t and that this had all been a mistake, please take her back to the Barracks and their separate, lonely bedrooms.

“Oh,” she said, tears returning, “the very best. I didn’t want to wake up. I was afraid it would all go away if I did.”

“You are awake now, and I am not going away,” he said very seriously, and then his tone lightened as he continued, “You are stuck with me.”

She laughed, a little waterily, at his echoing of the words she had thrown at him in the cave in the swamp months ago.

“Good,” she said, and pushed herself up until their mouths were level so she could kiss him soundly. 

When they drew apart to breathe, Sicarius released her to clap once, lighting the orbs on the walls to a low glow. After sleeping and talking in the pitch dark, even this small amount of light hurt, and by the time she adjusted to it, her husband — ancestors, she had a _husband_ — was lying beside her, propped up on one elbow and looking down at her. His hair was sticking out in every direction, more so than usual, and she felt a surge of proprietary pride and accomplishment. She was responsible for that. That was her work.

“Good morning, wife,” he said, brushing a few strands of hair off her face. Ugh, she probably didn’t look any better than he did, but this didn’t seem to be bothering him, judging by the tender expression on his face, so she decided not to worry about it.

“Good morning, er, husband.” She made a face. “It sounds strange when I say it, doesn’t it?”

His eyes crinkled.

“A little.”

“Well, I’ll just have to find a different endearment for you, because I like it when you call me your wife.” She blushed and tried not to curl her toes in embarrassment at this admission. At least she hadn’t said how much it pleased her to hear it, which was quite a bit. “You should have a pet name, too.”

“Really,” he said dryly.

“Really . . . hubby.”

He shook his head slightly and lowered it toward her, eyes bright.

“Sweetheart? Honey? Muffin? Baby? Sugar? Cupcake? Squishy bear?” Each time she tried a name, he lowered his head toward her, shaking it, until his lips were brushing hers at the last suggestion.

“Squishy bear?” he murmured against her mouth. She let her eyes flutter shut and her lips curve up.

“Yes. It suits yo—” His kiss stole her words, and this time it was quite a while before they came back up for air. When they did, he didn’t let her go, but pulled her into his side. She rested her head on his chest and listened to his heart beat beneath her ear, steady and strong and just a little bit fast. That was her work, too. She knew that eventually they would have to get out of bed and face the rest of the world, but she didn’t want that time to come any time soon. They had had so little time together without interruptions, and she didn’t want to measure out what was left of it in heartbeats.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said a moment later.

“You are capable of thinking at this time?”

“The power never really leaves me.”

He made a noise somewhere between a snort and a grunt, which she took as permission to continue.

“I know I said last night that we should get a real bed in here today,” she said, tilting her head up to look at him, “but technically this is our honeymoon.”

“Yes,” he allowed.

“Which we should be spending together. Alone. Not furniture shopping, which will involve things like putting on pants and seeing other people.”

“You do not wish to put on pants,” he said. “Is this a temporary desire or one which will persist for the foreseeable future?”

He was teasing. He was getting quite a lot of practice in this morning.

“Yes,” she said, smiling with satisfaction at her answer. He quirked an eyebrow at her and her smile increased.

“I want a day where you’re all mine, and we don’t have to worry about an emergency springing up or being interrupted by some well-meaning friend,” she continued. “Eventually we’re going to have to tell everybody, but not yet. Not today. It can wait until tomorrow.”

“It can wait,” he agreed, and then a speculative look appeared on his face. His chest rumbled beneath her cheek as he asked, “How will we occupy ourselves all day?”

Amaranthe took in his rumpled, unevenly cut hair and then let her gaze drift to what she could see of him above the blanket they were both under. Barring the hair, the view was excellent.

“Oh, I have plans,” she said.

***

"And you're certain it's accurate?" Deret asked the junior reporter assigned to the licensing hall. It was the beat all cubbies were assigned at first, on the principle that they wouldn't find anything there that would overtax their limited resources. On the other side of his desk, young Bern looked caught somewhere between dismay and delight at actually having uncovered a story. Considering what it was, Deret was right there with him, though his misgivings were his own. "Not a hoax or practical joke or anything?"

"Yes, sir," the anxious young man replied. "I checked the signatures -- well, signature. We didn't have a sample to compare against his, but there were plenty of reports on file from when she was an enforcer to compare against Lokdon's. They match up, no doubt about it."

"The fingerprints?"

"I put in a records request with the enforcers for copies of Lokdon's, but . . ." Bern trailed off, looking like a poor man who had just found a gold coin firmly embedded in a pile of donkey dung. "The fingerprints on the original were kind of what made us think it was real."

"I thought you discovered this on your own." Deret peered at him over the tops of his spectacles, and the boy had the grace to flush.

"The, uh, registrar's clerk found it when she was going through the licenses to be, er, recorded this morning," he stammered. "I was waiting for her to, you know, give me the notices the registrar wanted printed this week, and I, uh, talked her into giving me a copy of the license."

"Ah, the beautiful Ms. Garik, with the low-cut blouses, who keeps the list of notices in her bottom desk drawer." He let Bern squirm for a minute at having been found out in the one small pleasure of being assigned the licensing hall. When Deret had come home from Amentar, the weekly promise of Ms. Garik had been the only thing that had kept him coming to work those first few months. And then he had pulled his head out of his ass and grown up, double time. The opportunities opened up by discovering this story might do the same for Bern, or he might die trying. Literally.

Deret looked at the copy of the marriage license in his hand and tried to find something exceptional about the fingerprints to guarantee they belonged to Sicarius and Amaranthe, not some forger trying to stir up a story in the sleepy summer months. Not that they needed to, with all the reforms being pushed through by the new government. That he held a perfect black-and-white copy of the license was evidence enough -- it was made with some imported magical device from the Kyatt Islands that the government had installed in all its public offices. The outcry over that had died down once everyone realized how damned convenient it was, but there was always some new controversy to cover.

Frowning, he studied the signatures just below the fingerprints. He'd never seen it before, but Amaranthe's looked like it should belong to her, neat and balanced and formed with perfect confidence. It didn't waver at all, as if she hadn't had a moment's doubt about what she was signing. As for the other signature, it was spiky and precise and surprisingly delicate, like the slender, curving blade of a quality saber. That delicacy made a saber no less deadly, and he supposed the same applied here. His own handwriting, blocky and full of impatient blobs of ink, compared disfavorably. Maybe if he—

Emperor's bunions, he would not feel _inadequate_ because that man's handwriting was more legible than his.

"What was so special about the fingerprints on the original?" he asked, trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism over the hollow well of disappointment growing in him.

"Well." Bern looked away and scratched the side of his nose. "They were in blood."

Ah, yes. That would do it.

"Bern, what we need here is discretion," Deret said, laying the offending document on the desk.

"I don't disagree," he replied, "but if we don't run this the _Imperial Standard_ will."

Deret shrugged.

"They've run other stories before us."

"This is front page," Bern said. "Not a sentence buried in the society pages or a hundred words crammed in next to the classified ads. This is no satrapy governor's assistant caught with his pants down on a wild weekend in the capital. This is a front page story if it's allowed to be."

"You need to have a byline or two under your belt before you're that cynical about your editors, lad."

The possibility of having a byline on the front page less than a year after he'd been hired seemed to have burned away Bern's earlier trepidation. "I could have one," he said, leaving the _if you stopped being so stupid about this_ hanging unspoken between them.

"What you have is enough information for an announcement in the betrothals and marriages column, and even then you don't know what the bride was wearing, so you've only got half of what you actually need." He chased firmly away an image of Amaranthe dressed in something floaty and pale, a vision he had entertained a daydream or two of over the course of the final toppling of Forge. There had been a series of clandestine, candlelit meetings with her, and he had dreamed . . . "And that _would_ be in the society pages," he finished gruffly.

"I could fill out a story about this. Half of it would be their past exploits, and I've got to cover the break-in at the licensing office--"

“You don't know that they did break in." They probably had broken in, but Bern didn't know it for a fact, and writing the story like he did would be nothing but plain bad journalism. Not that the _Gazette_ 's record was especially clear on that account when it came to this particular couple. Or Deret's record, for that matter.

"-- and then it would only make sense to interview anybody who might know when their relationship started," Bern continued as if Deret hadn't spoken, "to say nothing of interviewing _them_."

Deret sat bolt upright in his chair, hands gripping the arms.

"Bern, no. You do not have the experience to interview Sicarius, of all people. Trust me on this. I've talked to the man. He is not kind to journalists who might print things he won't like, and he will not like this." Bern didn’t have the experience to interview Amaranthe, who could wrap him around her little finger like a string if she felt she needed to.

Bern scoffed, the pampered son of a warrior-caste family that he was.

" _You_ just wrote an article last month about how he's a 'reformed man'. What do I have to fear from a reformed man?"

"Everything," Deret said, wondering if he had ever been that stupid and remembering what the butcher block in his kitchen felt like against his face. Bern had spoken in such a way that a "reformed man" sounded like equivalent of an apple pastry from Curi's Bakery in terms of potential menace. "Even reformed men don't like their marriages on the front page. This one just has a wider array of skills to worry you."

The boy opened his mouth to say something else that would further his case in no way whatsoever, but before he could speak, he was interrupted by a commotion near the front entrance. He and Deret both swiveled toward the noise as the usual bustling clatter of the newsroom fell away.

"Fire!" yelled an out-of-breath man, the door still wheezing on its hinges behind him. "In the industrial district! Three warehouses on the waterfront, and it's spreading. They're running cows from the slaughterhouse along the canal streets to escape the flames!"

After a suspended moment of silence, the room exploded as the handful of reporters without assigned stories or looming deadlines all tried to reach the door at once. Most of them were not above shoving the others out of their way, so it came as little surprise when six or seven men went down in a tangle of limbs and curses. One man broke free, and a hand reached out of the pile to pull him back down with the others. Even those who tried to step around the mess ended up part of it, and in short order there were nearly a dozen newspaper employees writhing and shouting on the floor, while everybody else in the room kept a safe distance and took bets.

Ah, Turgonia. Where even men with desk jobs found ways to embrace violence in their daily lives. Sespian had a long road ahead of him.

On the other side of the brawl, Deret caught a flicker of stealthy movement. A woman with a mass of black, curly hair gathered low on her neck was trying to edge along the wall toward the door without attracting the notice of the reporters rolling on the floor. Until recently, Mirel had been the _Gazette_ 's foreign correspondent in the Kyattese capital, but had returned to Stumps for personal reasons. Something to do with her family -- Deret hadn't pressed for details. Now he leaned back in his chair and wondered how she was going to escape this.

He got an answer when, just as she had nearly passed the horde of reporters, someone tried to snag her ankle and drag her down into the mass. She scowled down at the man, and with a move that looked suspiciously practiced, jerked her foot forward to free herself, and on the return, crushed the man's fingers into the wooden floor with her heel. Deret winced — there was nothing delicate about a lady's boot built for walking the city streets. By the shout that rose up from the floor, someone had just learned that using the empiric method.

"It's my story, boys!" Mirel called, snagging her hat and satchel off the pegs by the door. The group on the floor froze as one and stared at her, except for a man who frowned as he rubbed his hand.

"Now, see here, Stonecrest," somebody called. He sounded as if someone might be laying on his head. "You can't just steal that story from the rest of us."

"Steal it? I made it to the door first, because you were all too busy trying to knock each other unconscious." She slapped her hat on her head and slung the satchel over her shoulder. "Besides, I defeated Rocky in combat."

"In comba-- woman, you stepped on my hand!" the frowning man exclaimed. Deret felt like rolling his eyes. As if no one had ever disabled an opponent like that in battle. Perhaps Rocky would feel better about it if she had kicked him in the head, though Deret doubted it.

Mirel tipped her hat at Rocky, grinning.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you that a lady must do whatever she can to protect her honor and dignity?" she asked.

"You are no lady," Rocky shot back.

"That's right," she said. "I'm a newswoman. I have a higher calling. Good day, gentlemen." She tipped her hat again and headed out the door, the crash of it against the jamb not quite covering her laugh.

"New girl needs to tone it down," Bern commented as people picked themselves up off the floor and money exchanged hands among the spectators. "She can't expect to just charge in here and get stories straight off the bat."

"Look in a mirror, Bern," Deret said with real derision. He had definitely never been this stupid. "Mirel Stonecrest is ten years older than you and has a list of bylines as long as my arm behind her. If she wants a story, she's earned it at this point."

Bern thumped a hand against Deret's desk and scowled down at him.

"This thing with Sicarius is my story," he insisted.

"No, it's not," Deret said flatly. "You don't have the experience for it. I can only think of about three people I'd trust with this, and one of them just walked out the door." And one of them was dead, which left one other person.

Bern's face twisted with anger and disappointment, and Deret felt a wave of sympathy for him. He might never have been that stupid, but recent events showed that his own store of it wasn't about to run short any time soon.

"I'll bump you up to the police blotter with Venzlas as a reward for finding the story," he said. "One of the office boys can take over the licensing hall beat."

"Not Jemmy."

"Oh, definitely not Jemmy. Don't even worry about Jemmy coming within ten paces of Ms. Garik. I thought Arno."

Bern nodded and looked down at the desktop, frowning. If Deret had to guess, he might have said that the boy was swallowing tears.

"Arno's good. He's a steady lad," he said at last. "Who are you -- who's getting this story?"

"I'm taking it." Deret was careful not to say this gently -- gentleness on top of the wounded pride of a nineteen-year-old boy might make Bern throw himself off the roof of the building.

"You're an _editor_ ," the younger man bit out, still not looking up. Deret had already gotten his breaks, Bern meant, and now the old man needed to step back and let some young blood in.

"I've interviewed Sicarius before. We have reached what you might call a working truce." Deret was quiet until Bern raised his eyes. "I can't put you in danger covering a story like this. You know how I became editor."

Bern nodded again, slowly this time. Deret had become editor when the previous man in his position had poked his nose too far into Forge's plotting and had been on the verge of upsetting the order of things. Ravido Marblecrest's treasonous thugs had killed him in his upstairs office, which was why Deret still had a desk on the main floor. Blood in the streets might sell papers, but blood on the office floor contributed greatly to writer's block for his reporters.

"OK," he sighed. "Thank you for the promotion. And for listening when I brought you the license and stuff."

"It was good work. Good research. I'm pleased you came to me with it. A newsman gets all his facts straight before running after a big story like this. Well done, Bern."

That at least got a faint smile out of him, even if his promotion hadn't.

"Say, Bern," Deret said before he could turn to leave. The boy turned back to him and waited for him to continue.

"Pay attention to what Venzlas has to teach you. He's one of the best. Big stories start out small, and Venzlas has been uncovering them for decades on the police blotter. It's just matching up the little details to put together the big picture. Patience and stubbornness, not waiting for a big break."

"Yes, sir." He hesitated, thinking. "What if I don't get another big break?"

"There's always a next big story. Something new always comes along. That's what makes it news."

The boy rolled his eyes at that and left Deret alone at his desk.

Deret stood up and stretched, gathering together his things in preparation for a day spent trudging around the city as he interviewed people. This was too big of a story to rush it to be ready for the evening edition, but tomorrow morning's paper should be shock enough for the city. The _Imperial Standard_ wouldn't send people to pick up the licensing hall notices until after tomorrow's paper hit the newsstands, anyway. They ran them at the end of the week, not the beginning like the _Gazette_. Patience and stubbornness.

Arguments with cub reporters, office brawls, half the city on fire -- all in a . . . Deret pulled his pocket watch out to check the time. It wasn't even nine yet, which meant he had been at work for less than two hours. Wonderful. He could not imagine what the rest of the day might hold for him. He hoped not a knife in the eye.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A haircut. Two men and a chicken.

Sicarius stood next to the straight-back chair he had dragged out of the bedroom and into the utility room, taking in Amaranthe’s appearance as she paused in the doorway.

“Yes?” she said when he showed no signs of speaking any time soon.

“You are wearing pants,” he said mildly.

“Ah, no.” She raised a hand in the air palm up, as if laying out an academic argument. “I am wearing a pair of your undershorts and one of your undershirts, because someone neglected to pack me any clean clothes whatsoever for this expedition. Technically we are wearing the same outfit, and neither one involves pants.” 

Except his actually fit. Sicarius’s undershorts were distressingly billowy on her, and until she had rolled the waistband over several times, had displayed a fondness for hitting the floor. Now, there was a good reason for regular visits to Curi’s Bakery in the future. Er, if she was going to make a habit of wearing his underwear, that was. Which she wasn’t.

“I am not wearing a shirt.” Which was fine by her. He could give up shirts forever as far as she was concerned.

“But we are both wearing your underwear.”

His eyes glinted and a tiny smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

“If you took your shirt off, then we would be wearing the same outfit,” he said. Apparently she could give up shirts forever, too, as far as Sicarius was concerned.

She lifted the scissors she carried in her other hand, which she had scrounged up from the armory. She had already tested them, and they were very sharp. Like every other bladed item he owned, Sicarius kept them in top shape.

“Not when I’m about to cut your hair. The second rule of scissor use is no topless cutting.” She waved to the chair. “Now please sit down so I can start beautifying you.”

“What is the first rule of scissor use?” he asked, not sitting. That there might be rules for using scissors appeared to be something he had never encountered before.

Amaranthe smiled.

“No running with scissors. Now sit.”

Sicarius grunted, but sat down. She supposed that if he had been taught as a small boy never to run with sharp objects, he would have led a very different life. But, she thought as she stepped around behind him, then she probably would have never met him. That had been the one reward for everything they had gone through in the past year — they had done it together. She ran her hand over his hair. And now they were _together_ and a new future lay ahead of them. Possibly even without running with blades of any sort.

“You will need a comb,” Sicarius said, looking back at her.

“I know,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder as she turned away to grab the comb on the table off to the side. Sicarius laid his hand over hers and squeezed. She turned her hand up and squeezed back before beginning to put his hair to rights, not bothering to keep the smile off her face.

“So, what are we going to tell everyone when we get back to the Barracks?” she asked when she was nearly done trimming. She hadn’t stopped to take a good look at him yet, but she was looking forward to seeing what he looked like with hair that was all close to the same length.

He shrugged.

“What is there to tell? We are married, we will be sleeping in the same room, everything else is the same.”

“Everything?” she repeated, trying not to latch onto the thing about sleeping in the same room.

He raised a hand in the air, and she wished she could see his face.

“Everything and nothing. The only thing that will change for them is their awareness of our love for each other. What the group does and how it functions together will stay the same.” He let his hand fall. “I loved you a long time and did not know it, and then when I did, I was prevented from telling you by circumstances beyond the control of either of us. This did not affect the group’s functioning in an appreciable way. I am not concerned with the reactions of anyone to this news unless they wish us harm.”

She swallowed, disquieted at the prospect of new enemies just because they had gotten married. Or the old ones renewing their efforts, rather. They would have to come back to that thing about the group's functioning not being affected later.

“And if they do wish us harm?” she asked, hoping she already knew the answer.

“I will not act unless they try to harm us,” he said promptly. He hesitated. “But if they do, I will not restrain myself. Active threats must be removed.”

This was actually pretty much what she had expected to hear, which relieved her. Now that she had him, she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t try to remove anyone who tried to harm Sicarius, too.

“But still,” she said as she snipped around his ear, “there are going to be questions. Like when this all started, since we’ve both done such a good job of keeping it under wraps. People generally don’t get married without some warning beforehand.”

“That will be a long story,” he said, sounding amused.

“How long?” She was interested to hear the answer to this question, since she had never been able to pin down the exact time when her dubious and highly idiosyncratic charms had snared his attention.

He was quiet a moment, as if ordering his thoughts.

“I was intrigued before I ever met you,” he admitted, “mostly because I wanted to meet the woman who had asked for me by name so frequently across the city. And then when you stood naked in your bath and laid out your plan to threaten the stability of the ranmya, I began to regret that my son was interested in you.”

He had peeked. That probably shouldn’t make her happy, but it really, really did. Of course, toward the end there, she had not made much effort to hide herself, so maybe peeking wasn’t the correct term to use.

“I knew you looked,” she said anyway.

“I really had no choice in the matter,” he said dryly, “but it was not merely what I saw that attracted me. It was the entirety of what I was presented with.” She flushed pleasurably. He must really love her if she had caught his attention even half-dead and plotting and he looked back on it fondly. “And you?”

“A few hours before that, when I saw you training,” she admitted reluctantly. “It kind of snowballed from there.”

“Against your better judgment.” She was beginning to suspect that “smug” was his middle name.

“Yes, thank both our ancestors,” she said, “otherwise you would have spent the rest of your life looking like you cut your hair with a rusty spoon.” She laid aside the scissors and comb and picked up the razor. “Hold still while I trim up around your neck. I haven’t done this since my father died. I don’t want to cut you.”

“Amaranthe,” Sicarius said before she could start.

“Yes?”

His voice was calm and confident when spoke, not flat but sure.

“I trust you.” 

Oh, dear. She was standing behind him, holding a straight razor, and he felt he had to tell her he trusted her. Or thought she needed the reassurance to make it through this next bit. If this was what marriage was, she was probably going to spend a small portion of each day blotting away tears.

“I know,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “I just don’t want to hurt you by accident.”

“You won’t,” he said in that same voice.

“I’ll try not to.” She rested her hand on top of his head, tipping it forward so she had a clear view of his neck. Keeping her other hand steady, she carefully scraped away the hair, squaring off the growth at the nape of his neck. Sicarius held very still under the blade, not even twitching as it tickled over his neck. Her father had always squirmed a little at this point, saying that the light touch the razor called for was worse than a feather. He could have gone to a professional to have his hair cut, but there hadn’t been the money for it. She was glad for the experience now, because she wouldn’t have had a reason to know how otherwise, and there was no hope Sicarius would ever let a stranger do this.

“Doodlebug,” she said experimentally when she was finished, hand still on his head. It was the fifth or sixth suggestion she had made since they had finally gotten out of their pallet this morning.

Sicarius sat very still for a moment and then almost imperceptibly shook his head.

“My little doodlebug?”

This got a look over his shoulder, a raised eyebrow, and a solid “No.”

Amaranthe sighed and let her hand slide down to stroke his neck. Even relaxed, she could feel how strong the muscles there were.

“We’ll find one that works,” she said. “There are hundreds of endearments out there. There must be one that will work for you.”

Sicarius bowed his head under her massage and she felt a wave of happiness wash over her. It was so nice just to touch him, openly, affectionately, after so long bottling it inside. She no longer feared that he might bolt away from her at any moment.

“Would you have preferred,” he asked, eyes closed, “if I had broken into your room and stolen garments from your wardrobe?”

She slid her hands down his chest and wrapped him in an embrace from behind.

“I would have preferred if you had given me some warning so I could have bought myself something special for the occasion. Something transparent. With lace. Maybe those little satin bows. Ooh, or something slinky. That clings.” He wasn’t tense, but he was certainly paying attention. She laid her cheek against the top of his head. “Or _you_ could have bought me something. I’m sure Maldynado could have given you some advice if you weren’t—”

Without warning, Sicarius snaked his arm behind him and pulled her around to the front, so she ended up sitting on his lap. He looked at her sternly, or maybe only with exasperation. Even with his annoyed expression, he was so handsome she felt a little breathless. If his hair had been neatly trimmed when she first met him, she probably would have tried seduction like Hollowcrest had suggested. By melting into a puddle at Sicarius’s feet, which could not have impressed him any less than what she did do.

“Maldynado will not be consulted on your undergarments,” he said, enunciating every syllable carefully.

“No?” she asked, grinning widely. “But he has so much experience with ladies’ frilly bits. It would be like consulting Books on any other subject.”

“I neither need nor desire consultation on this subject.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’ve already got a pretty good idea of what you might like,” she said, not sure how she made it to the end of the sentence without squeaking.

In answer, Sicarius slid a couple fingers under the folded over waistband of her undershorts and tugged down, eyes intent on hers. She was gathering the impression that he was a warm supporter of that no pants option she had suggested earlier. And why wouldn’t he be, with his track record?

“Your underwear, then?” she said, the chance to tease him too much to pass up. “Not what I would have expected, but this is your fantasy.”

He snorted and stood, lifting her in one smooth motion. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He headed toward the tub they had filled with water before she started cutting his hair. Two steaming buckets of water stood ready on the stove to bring the temperature up before he — or they — got in. Hmm. Maybe this was her fantasy after all.

“Pookie?” she whispered against his shoulder.

Sicarius pulled back and gave her a hard look. OK, not that one. Back to the drawing board. But first, the tub.

***

Maldynado leaned against the wall next to the girl he loved second best in all the world. It was a glorious summer day just past lunchtime, he was here with her in the gardens of the Imperial Barracks, and he had not been this happy for a long time.

“I want to throw you a party,” he said, staring into her beautiful black eyes, “to celebrate the love I hold for you.”

His girl clucked and pecked at a passing beetle, her claws clicking against the patio tiles as the beetle escaped and she followed in pursuit.

“You do know that the chicken can’t understand you, right?” asked the girl he loved first best.

“Isabel can,” he assured Yara, sitting next to Books an armspan away on a cushioned bench in the sun. “She is a superlative bird.”

Yara’s eyes, also fine and dark, darted between him and the bobbing rear of the chicken, now zig-zagging across the patio after the elusive beetle.

“I see,” she said cautiously. “And does this Isabel answer back?”

Mal sniffed. He knew when he was being made fun of.

“We’ve only just been reunited after a long separation, so her answers have been slow in coming.” On the other end of the patio, Isabel let out a triumphant cackle, and he turned toward her in alarm. “Isabel, honey, no! Eat the special food I bought you. You don’t know where that beetle’s been. It could be diseased!”

Behind him, he heard Yara stage whisper to Books, “What have I gotten myself into?”

“Humor him,” Books advised her. “There are so few creatures he can truly feel superior to.”

To Mal’s pleasure, this was followed by Books yelping as Yara punched him in the shoulder for insulting Mal. Or possibly for insulting Isabel, which would please him even more. Or for adding words like “superlative” to his vocabulary. The man’s influence really knew no bounds.

As Mal reached Isabel, she hopped down the steps that led to the green lawn stretching between the flowerbeds and darted away to a gate standing open. To freedom and to danger. That gate led to the kitchen entrance. There were soup pots out there.

He had learned, however, that pursuing Isabel while exhorting her to hold still never worked and actually encouraged her to run faster. So he did not try to cajole her into stopping before she reached the gate, which meant neither he nor the man giving Isabel room to pass were prepared for the collision as he came through. The most embarrassing part was that not even all of Sicarius’s training had given him the speed to outstrip a chicken.

“Deret!” he exclaimed when he recognized the fellow pulling himself upright with the gatepost. He scooped up the hat that had been knocked off and handed it to him. “What are you doing here?”

“Risking my life in the name of journalism, apparently,” Deret said, scraping his hair back and settling the hat back in place. “Have you seen Amaranthe lately? I need to interview her for the paper.”

“I haven’t seen her since yesterday. She gave us all a few days off this week, on account of the beautiful weather.” He beamed and gestured toward Isabel, harassing something on the ground at the far end of the outdoor corridor. “And Isabel’s return. I’m throwing a party for her at the end of the week.”

“Do you know where she’s at? I’m working against a deadline, and this story is a big one.” Very unkindly, Deret ignored his news about Isabel’s return. It wasn’t every day that a chicken came back to her master after sheltering for the better part of a year at a rural bordello. Evrial had let him know this at length.

“No, like I said, haven’t seen her since yesterday. Usually we see her at breakfast, but Evy and I slept through breakfast, if you know what I mean. No early morning training today.” Going by the quelling look he got in response, Deret did.

“That’s what the corporal I talked to said. That nobody had seen Amaranthe since yesterday, not that you and Evrial . . .” Deret shoved his glasses up and pinched the bridge of his nose briefly. “If she’s not around, is _he?”_

 _He_ could only refer to Sicarius. Deret avoided saying his name at all costs. Maldynado wasn’t sure what the beef was between those two — he gathered something unpleasant had happened last year when he had arranged that cedar-scented dinner party for two, but something unpleasant generally did when Sicarius was involved. Running stairs before the sun was up, for example.

“Nope, haven’t seen him either.”

“Do you know if they went off somewhere together? Last night around dusk, maybe? Between seven and eight?”

Maldynado squinted at him.

“Mancrest, why are you asking all these questions? Did Sicarius and Amaranthe do something illegal last night? Because I’m telling you right now we don’t do that anymore and they’re innocent.”

Deret scrutinized him for a moment, as if debating whether or not to tell him something. At last, a resigned look came over his face, and he dug something out of his satchel, extending it to Maldynado.

“Look that over and tell me what you think,” he said.

Maldynado accepted the paper and unfolded it. It was a copy of a marriage license. Then he saw in whose names it was made out and made a face as if he had smelled something foul.

“That _has_ to be a forgery.”

Mancrest shook his head.

“One of my rookies found it at the licensing hall along with the registrar’s assistant this morning. It was in the file of records to be processed and stamped today.”

“Deret, I’ve been saying to you for months that if you like Amaranthe, you need to make a move. She’s got all sorts of handsome military men sniffing after her all the time. She practically has to beat them with a stick to get them to leave her alone.” Or do what she actually did, which was to have Sicarius trail two steps behind her at all times, staring daggers at any male over the age of sixteen who talked to her for more than five minutes at a stretch. Mal tapped the paper. “This, however, is not an approved method of taking her off the market. And whoever’s responsible for it did it wrong, since they put Sicarius’s name down instead of theirs.”

Mancrest groaned.

“It’s real, Maldynado. I’ve seen the original, I’ve compared the signatures to known examples, and it’s real. I’m just trying to track one of those two down for comment.” He sagged. “And failing that, comment from someone close to them both. Which I guess means you.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so disappointed about it.” He handed the copy back. “Look, people don’t just get married out of the blue without some sort of courtship first, and I really doubt Sicarius is capable of any sort of courting behavior. He doesn’t even let her slack off in training. He pushes her harder than any of the rest of us, and all she gets in return is a nod or a grunt of approval.” Mal had been keeping an eye open since his talk with Booksie in the junkyard and he could not identify one moment of tenderness that had passed between Sicarius and Amaranthe in his presence. Friends, maybe. But marriage? No way.

“So, you’re saying that to your knowledge, Amaranthe and Sicarius are not engaged in a romantic relationship at this time or any time in the past?” Deret asked.

Mal nodded.

“Yep, that sounds about right. They’re friends, maybe even good friends, but romance is entirely out of the question.”

Instead of looking relieved, Deret looked more confused than ever.

“Is there anybody else around that I can talk to? Evrial or Marl? Basilard?” To Mal’s amusement, Deret had insisted on referring to Books by his preferred name since they had worked together that winter and spring.

He thought now of Books and Evy sitting in the garden in the sun, relaxed and peaceful for the first time in he didn’t know how long. It didn’t seem fair to them, or Basilard, to have Mancrest pester them with ludicrous questions, especially ones that pried into the boss’s personal life, fictional or factual.

“Everybody’s gone out for the day,” he lied. Deret looked annoyed.

“Well, if they turn up again before eight tonight, you know where to find me.”

Isabel wandered over and pecked at Deret’s shoes.

“What is this chicken doing?” Deret asked, lip curling. Maldynado frowned. Deret, already on the intense side on his best days, seemed more high strung than usual. This was something to be exploited.

“Saying hello. You should say hello back. It’s only polite.”

Deret glared back at him, and Maldynado made a little encouraging motion with his hand. Looking down, Deret said flatly, “Chicken.”

“Her name’s Isabel,” Mal said, not one to let an opportunity to irritate Mancrest go by.

“You are not going to make me call a chicken by a people name.”

Maldynado spread a hand across his chest and gazed upon his friend with disgust. He did enjoy these moments.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day where Deret Mancrest would mistreat a lady. Your mother raised you better than this.”

Deret looked at him with far less regard he had shown Isabel, but now that Mal had brought his mother into it, there was really nowhere to go. Lady Mancrest prided herself on the good manners she had raised her boys with, and now that Mal was restored to his position in society, he was not above using those powers to make Deret’s life difficult by telling his mother he had been rude to Mal’s girl Isabel. It was what friends were for.

The other man gave a long suffering sigh, and in a voice laden with every evidence of sincerity and deference, he said, “Good afternoon, Ms. Isabel. I hope you are enjoying the fair weather.”

In response, Isabel cocked her head to one side, released a cacophonous squawk, and defecated inches from Mancrest’s shoe.

“Well,” he said, “that about sums up my day. Your chicken is a menace, Marblecrest.” With that, he turned around and left the way he came, stick tapping loudly against the tiles and echoing around the stone walls of the corridor.

Maldynado folded his arms across his chest and leaned once more against the wall to bask in the sun. Eventually he might let Mancrest back into his good graces, but he was going to take his time about it. Maybe Amaranthe had seen it wise to get friendly with Deret, to gather information about Forge when they had been trying to hunt down the team like game animals, but he was willing to hold onto his grudge. Deret needed someone to keep him humble, after all. Maldynado was performing him a service, in a way.

“Good work, chicken,” Maldynado said to Isabel as she pecked nearby. There was nothing like working in a team.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brandy: the Turgonian tequila. Even in very small quantities.

When Deret came back to the newspaper building, footsore and out of sorts, he was relieved to see that all the desks on the main floor were empty. It was too late for things to still need writing for the evening edition, and everyone tended to clear out around six to eat a meal anywhere but in the office. A few diehards with deadlines might show up again after eight, but it was unlikely. All this meant he wouldn't have to tow his personal thundercloud through dozens of men trained to get to the bottom of the story no matter the obstacles put in their way, for which he was grateful.

It also meant that he was unprepared when a figure with long, dark hair and wearing a light overcoat came out of the office kitchen and immediately dashed back in, leaving behind only a trail of something which steamed on the floor. If it hadn't been for that, he would have thought he dreamt it. Whoever it was had been quick.

"Who's there?" he called, shifting his grip on his sword stick to release the cover if he needed to. He really hoped he didn't. What he needed was a stiff drink. Or several, at which point he could start seeing things, no problem.

After a moment, a familiar voice from the kitchen said, "This isn't a good time, Mancrest."

Deret lowered his stick.

"Mirel?" 

He went to the kitchen doorway and peered inside. Holding a mug and standing in the narrow alley between the cabinets and the icebox, as far into the kitchen as she could get without burning her backside on the antiquated stove, was the paper's latest transfer from Kyatt. She was wearing a knee-length coat, belted tightly at the waist, and not much else. Not even shoes. This was, to his knowledge, not generally how she dressed for work. His gaze slipped up from her bare feet to her curly head, which was wet and mostly straight at the moment. The front and shoulders of her pale yellow coat were damp in patches where her hair had lain.

"Deret," Mirel said levelly.

He jerked his eyes up, realizing he had been staring at . . . zones which were professionally off-limits. Mirel let one corner of her mouth tip up knowingly, and he struggled not to blush or try to explain it away.

"What happened to you?" he asked instead, leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb. He nearly sighed in relief at having some of the weight taken off of his leg. There had been too much sitting behind a desk and not enough exercise for him lately. 

Rather than Mirel's smile disappearing at his question, it seemed to quadruple.

"I had a run-in with a fire hose," she said ruefully.

Deret's eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. The hoses the fire brigades used packed a lot of power. He'd seen them used a few years ago to break up a riot, and it was not one of his fonder memories.

"Ancestors, are you all right? Did you get hurt?"

"Oh, I didn't get caught in the crossfire," she said, setting the mug on the counter. She slouched beside it, arms folded across her waist. "I only got the backspray when the stream hit a brick wall. I'm fine, but my shoes were a complete loss."

"And the rest of your clothes?"

"All over ash and smoke, but that happened before the water. There was no way I could stay in what I was wearing, so I tossed the lot in the trash barrel and sent the office boy out to buy me new things while I washed up. Lucky me that my coat was here."

Despite his mood, Deret felt a grin coming on.

"You sent Jemmy shopping for ladies' clothing?" Their office boy was at some amorphous age between a lovelorn fourteen and an embittered sixty-five when it came to women -- he kept his distance and expected them to keep theirs, especially if there was any hint of soap or water involved. Deret had seen him put a cup of coffee on Mirel's desk while still standing nearly six feet away, an interesting exercise when he barely cracked five feet on a tall day.

"For lack of a better option, yes." She pressed her hand to her mouth for a moment to cover her own grin. "He must have discerning taste, because that was more than an hour ago now."

"Or he's halfway to the northern frontier, and we'll never see him again."

Mirel snorted, without a trace of delicacy.

"If he can make it that far on 40 ranmyas and a shopping list, my hat's off to him."

"And everything else, too," Deret said before he could stop himself. Mirel stared at him for one interminable moment and then laughed outright, dragging him along with her. He had always loved to laugh, and he had lost the trick of it for a few years. Somewhere in the past year he had found it again. There had been a few times during those meetings where he and Amaranthe had gotten off on bantering tangents and he had thought he would hurt himself laughing. But Sicarius was always lurking somewhere in the background, silent and disapproving -- Deret shouldn't have ever gotten his hopes up. He should have known a jealous man when he saw one.

When she realized he was no longer laughing, Mirel stopped and tipped her head toward him.

"Everything fine with you?"

Deret straightened away from the doorjamb so he wouldn't have to look her in the face while he lied to her.

"Yes, of course. It's been a long day. I'm sure you understand. Say," he said, more to change the subject than anything else, "I've got an extra shirt and a pair of trousers in my desk, if you want to put on something that will let you come out of there."

She looked as if she might press him on his answer for a moment, but only raised an eyebrow and asked, "Are you sure they'd fit?"

It was a legitimate question. While she had the statuesque and robust figure that so many women from warrior caste families did, her head still didn't clear his chin and she was nowhere near as burly as he was. His clothes would probably hang on her like a sack.

"No," he said, "but I can lend you a belt."

"Arm and leg extensions, too?"

"Probably not." He made a show of looking over his shoulder, toward the desk corral. "Unless you've got some in your desk?"

She made a comically aggrieved face, as if he had just suggested she report on the annual moustache and beard competition in Sunders City by going undercover as a contestant.

"Oh, all right," she said. "Beggars can't be choosers."

***

By the time Mirel re-emerged from the kitchen, Deret had established himself at his desk and gotten a good start on his story. In truth, there wasn't much to write fresh. Most of it could be pulled from previous articles he'd written on the Emperor's Edge and Sicarius's various misdeeds, though Deret wasn't certain that a list of assassinations and murders set the right tone for an article about a wedding. Still, this was Turgonia. More than one of their most beloved romantic tales centered around mass homicide. Most of the women in the empire would probably sigh admiringly over that list now that Sicarius had been pardoned.

"Not for you to decide, Mancrest," he muttered as he reached for his penknife. "Just get it to your editor and let him worry about it."

"What's not for you to decide? And aren't you your editor now?" Mirel asked from behind him.

Deret glanced over his shoulder, caught a glimpse of her, and then swung his chair around to watch her approach his desk. She cut a picture of some kind or another.

“You look,” he began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. _Better than I do in that outfit_ wasn’t something you said to a fellow journalist, and not especially true at any rate. She looked faintly ridiculous. But there was something about the sight of her in his white shirt, open to just a handspan below her collarbones, with an expanse of tanned skin rising above that first button. The shirt was too wide for her, so one shoulder was nearly exposed, and the hem hung almost to her knees. Overall, the effect was good. It was really good. Better if she lost the pants, but possibly safer if she didn’t for everyone concerned.

“Like a scarecrow,” she said, thrusting out one of her arms. The sleeve dangled a good six inches past the tips of her fingers, and the pants hems puddled on the floor around her feet.

“That’s not what I was going to say.” 

“Right,” she said and shuffled over to him. “What were you saying about editors and decisions, Mr. News Editor?”

“It’s Lord News Editor,” he said, and she laughed. He tucked his pencil behind his ear and pointed to the chair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down and have a drink and I’ll tell you about it.”

While Mirel arranged herself in the seat, he pulled open his bottom desk drawer and took out another glass. The bottle of brandy was already on his desk and uncorked. He was halfway through his first, but wouldn’t have more until the story was finished. He poured a couple of fingers into the empty glass and handed it across the desk to her.

She swirled the brandy in the glass to warm it before sipping, eyes half closed as she swallowed. A smile tugged his lips. Warrior-caste women knew how to appreciate their liquor. You wouldn’t catch them rushing a glass of brandy. A sip at a time, pleasure stretched out.

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. Eyes still closed, she smiled, revealing a dimple. “Very nice. They don’t have anything like that in the Kyatt Islands. Rum’s all right, but it just can’t compare with a good apple brandy.”

“Tastes of home.”

She opened her eyes, eyebrows arching in surprise above them. They were gray. How had he missed that before? He had known her for years, though he supposed most of those were only by reputation, but he had somehow missed that she had gray eyes.

“I suppose it does at that. And it is good to be home again.” She looked at the glass as she swirled the brandy again. “Now, what was this about you not having to make decisions?”

“I’m having some trouble developing the story I’m working on.” He drew his pencil out from behind his ear, twirled it between his fingers. “I used to just put whatever I thought was important in and let Ansel decide before it went to print, but I don’t have Ansel anymore and I haven’t had much opportunity to write lately. Too busy making decisions for everybody else.”

Mirel looked sad at the mention of the former news editor, and Deret supposed that the death had shaken the Kyatt office as much as the one in Stumps. Ansel was the editor who had shaped them both as reporters, the one who had taught them the business. It was difficult to orient yourself when one of the stars in your sky had gone out.

“Straight news or human interest?” she asked after another sip of brandy.

“Straight news,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I can’t track down the couple at the heart of it, and a human interest story would be nothing without quotes from them.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s your strength. Your human interest stories read like there should be merry woodland creatures scampering through them. Pitiful kittens with big eyes.” She laughed at the expression on his face. “It’s true, Deret. Unless the topic is high heroics, you have all the delicacy of a sledgehammer.”

He grunted. It was true, but he didn’t have to like hearing it. And he was a newsman, emphasis on the news. If someone saved a baby from a burning building, then he would report it with a minimum of laudatory adjectives. Sometimes, though, he got carried away in the name of compensation for his terseness. Overcompensation, rather. It went way past adjectives — he found himself using adverbs. They just started sprouting up like mushrooms against his will.

“This is that Sicarius and Lokdon marriage thing, right?” Mirel asked, interrupting his musings on his failures as a newswriter.

“Yes,” he groaned. “More than a year of them creating real news for me to cover, and then they had to go and get married, which is only news because they’ve blown up half the empire in the past twelve months. And now I can’t figure out whether or not I can include the misdeeds in the story, because it might scare off the woodland creatures that should be in something about a wedding.” Also, and he could not say this aloud, the thought of Amaranthe with _that_ man was killing him. He was worried she might have cause to regret it in the future, and not from her own actions. Deret was not selfish enough to rank himself brokenhearted over Amaranthe brokenhearted. He wasn’t sure he was brokenhearted, just disappointed and hurt.

“Well, woodland creatures are to be avoided, even in stories about weddings.” She propped her elbow on the arm of her chair and leaned her face against her hand. “What was that thing Ansel used to say? ‘Report the facts. The facts always make people piss down their legs.’”

Ansel had known how to turn a phrase, in print or otherwise.

“So you’re saying I should make Sicarius piss down his leg?” No, thank you.

She made a face at him.

“Maybe not him. But filing a marriage license suggests that he was expecting it to be discovered. Nobody with his reputation would be naive enough to think it would go unnoticed.”

“You make a very valid point.” He leaned forward and started writing again. With his pencil still scribbling, he asked, “How did things turn out with that fire? The assistant editor sent me some messages this afternoon while I was out, but they were short on information.”

“Oh, it was pretty bad, Deret. Six warehouses burnt to the foundations.” She paused as she took a drink, and her voice was raspy when she continued. “Three people died.”

He glanced up, not liking the tone of her voice. That sad look was back, but this time the grief was fresh. It was out of place on the face of the woman who had laughed about sending the office boy to buy new clothes, but he imagined that she had been busy up until now. Stories like that had a way of creeping up on a person — rush, rush, rush to meet the deadline, hand the story in, and then a glass of brandy later and three people were gone, larger in death than they had ever been in life.

“And the chief wants this frivolous thing on the top of the page,” he said, dropping his pencil on what he had written so far and feeling disgusted with himself for being so wrapped up in it today he hadn’t paid attention to anything else.

Mirel lifted a hand and frowned.

“The fire was top of the page for the evening edition,” she said, “and it will be below the fold tomorrow morning. That’s still the front page. More people will see the story about the fire if this thing leads than if the fire did. Sicarius sells papers, and that’s an end to it.”

“It shouldn’t be,” he grumbled. He picked his pencil up and started writing again. “I have to keep working on this, but I’ll be listening. Tell me about today.”

She gave a small sigh and curled up in the chair, tucking her feet under her.

“Well, first of all, I should have let Rocky have it this morning,” she began.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Then he could be the one waiting on Jemmy to turn up with clothes and shoes so he could go home.”

“I admit that the prospect of finding Rocky in the staff kitchen in nothing but your overcoat is somewhat less appealing than finding you was. And I would not share my brandy with him, let alone my pants.” The question remained of when in the past six or so years of their acquaintance he had elevated her to pants-sharing status.

She raised her nearly empty glass to him.

“My privilege, then.” 

“Absolutely.” Some questions could wait to be answered.

Mirel gave an amused snort, and after a moment, launched into a description of her day. She included all the little details that never made it into the paper, from the smell of water from the lake turning to steam as it was pumped up to put out the flames to the apprehension that most reporters felt as they rushed into a situation that everybody else was running away from, not to help but only to observe.

Deret let her voice wash over him, answering when he could, but mostly letting it distract him from the reality of what he was working on. His mind moved on its own, shaping the facts into a story. Impartial, automatic — this happened, then that, and people think these things. All while Mirel sat and reminded him that the impartiality couldn’t last forever; some time, and probably soon, the nagging inside him would demand his attention and he’d have to give it. But not yet.

Eventually, he realized that they had been sitting comfortably in silence for quite some time, and the last light of dusk had faded away. Someone, not him, had lit the oil lamp on his desk, and they were both cast in its warm yellow pool, the rest of the newsroom shadowy and indistinct around them. He put down the last words of his story and looked up at Mirel apologetically.

“Sorry about that,” he said. He ran a hand over his head, feeling muscles across his shoulders complain at having been bent over the desk for so long. “I get lost sometimes, writing.”

“It’s OK,” she replied, and then grinned, turning up the dimple again. “I do it, too. It was interesting to observe it from the other end for once.”

For some reason, this made him feel anxious.

“What did you observe?” he asked

She opened her mouth to answer, but then closed it firmly and only shook her head, which as answers went, wasn’t too bad. There could be worse. If he wasn’t mistaken, there was a blush visible on her cheeks by the lamp’s cozy glow. When he noticed this, he felt obliged to hide his expression by taking off his spectacles and cleaning them. It took quite some time.

“Would you like another drink?” he asked when he had shoved his spectacles back in place.

“Sure,” she said, extending the glass across the desk. “I don’t think Jemmy’s showing up any time soon, and I’ve met all my deadlines.”

Deret stood to snag her glass, but after all that time sitting in the chair without moving, the muscles in his bad leg had stiffened. He grimaced. When he stood up, it would have to be slowly or not at all.

“You’ll have to bring it around,” he said.

Without saying anything, Mirel got up and padded around the desk. She stood close as he filled up her glass, and he felt the warmth of her along his side. He re-corked the brandy bottle, but didn’t make a move to hand her the glass and neither did she pick it up. The world slowly became limited to Mirel standing warm beside him in a pool of yellow lamplight, the scent of her filling his nose. Not flowery, but something spicy, overlaid with the scent of his cologne from his clothes. The two of those together, raised up by the warmth of her skin.

He didn’t usually feel like an enormous man — Turgonia was full of plenty of men who were much larger than him — but at the moment he felt like a veritable beast, and not necessarily because she was swimming in his shirt. Somewhere in his head, a little voice was whispering _traitor._ But how could you betray someone when the only promises made had been to someone else?

“Mirel,” he said voice gone hoarse.

She looked at him, and he saw she was caught in it, too, definitely flushed now and those silver eyes gone dark. He turned his chair toward her, and she stepped forward between his legs, raising a hand to trail an ink-stained finger along his jaw. He wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her close, even as some distant part of his brain suggested that what was coming next was a mistake. A breath, then two, passed between them, his and hers, chests rising and falling out of unison. Then Mirel tipped his head back with her thumb under his chin and pressed her parted lips to his, and rational thought stepped aside as the taste of brandy entered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to apologize to anybody with journalism experience whose head is exploding with Deret's complete disregard for journalistic ethics. You guys, he's a really bad journalist. Rocky should have had this story, too. When you're researching a story, you're not supposed to interview your best friend since childhood. And if the story _requires_ that you interview your childhood best friend, you don't take the story. And if the story involves a woman you might be in love with? Run. You run the other direction, handing the story off like a burning coal to another reporter. And then, depending on what the story is, you might what to find a new girlfriend. Just sayin'.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deret messes up. Things get heavy with Amaranthe and Sicarius.

His reverend ancestors, she was soft. A reporter’s body — what a revelation on a woman. He felt long, muscular legs between his own, matching what he had seen earlier in the kitchen. Most reporters, excepting the ones who devoted time to physical training, tended to go a little doughy in the torso, but on Mirel it was turned into lush curves laid over a delicate framework of bone. It was . . . extraordinary.

Deret slid a hand under the tail of her shirt and stroked across the smooth skin of her lower back. Mirel sighed against his mouth, strong legs trembling, and with a little encouragement, she eased onto his good leg, hands going to his hair so their lips wouldn’t part.

He explored her back, memorizing the dips and hollows with his fingers while kissing her. Hers was not the body that had occupied his imagination for the past year and more, so every touch came as a pleasant discovery. Her back wasn’t hard with muscle acquired through hours of training. She didn’t have scars from who knew what injuries crossing her skin. Amaranthe—

Mirel pulled herself away and hung over him, one hand braced on the back of the chair beside his head. They were both breathing a little heavily and he found that meeting her eyes was difficult.

“Deret, who are you with?” she asked quietly. He opened his mouth to answer, and she pressed her fingers to his lips to stop him. “Don’t tell me you’re with me, because you were not thinking about me when we were kissing. A person can tell, you know. You were there with me and I was with you, and then you weren’t and I was all by myself.”

He took a breath, closed his eyes, and shook his head. Mirel dropped her hand from beside his head and moved as if to get up, but he tightened his arm around her waist so she would stay where she was.

“I got some news about a girl I used to . . . date today,” he said, eyes still closed.

“Amaranthe _Lokdon?”_ Mirel nearly shouted next to his ear. His eyes flew open. “You used to date Amaranthe Lokdon?”

“How did you know?” He craned his head away so he could look at her. Her color was up, but he didn’t think she was so much angry as deeply annoyed. At him, so it wasn’t like the distinction was a great relief either way.

She glared back.

“I wonder,” she said. “It’s almost like I have a job where I come to conclusions based on the evidence I have at hand. And the evidence this time just happens to be the size of a steam freighter. In a bathtub.”

Deret snorted and let his head thud against the padded leather of the chair.

“I deserved that,” he said.

“And so much more,” she agreed. Then she sighed and shifted until she could rest her head in the hollow of his shoulder, all soft against him, if not quite relaxed. He adjusted his arms around her so she wouldn’t slide off his lap onto the floor, and hoped that he hadn’t messed this up irretrievably, because holding her was nice. He didn’t have any fancier words for it at the moment. He had spent a lovely evening with Mirel, his tense muscles unwinding with talk and a touch of brandy, and then he had kissed her, which had turned terrible only at the end. Now he was holding her and they were snuggled together like type ready to print. It was something he thought he could get used to.

“I’m 31,” she said suddenly, which struck him as not quite following anything they’d discussed that night.

“So? I’m 29. That’s not so far apart.”

“I’m too old to sign myself up for heartache,” she clarified. “That’s for kids Bern’s age. No one should have the energy for it past 25, but people manage to find it anyway. I won’t.”

Ouch. His ego.

“You’re good, you know that?” he asked.

“I’d better be, position I’m in, sitting on my boss’s lap. Hate for anyone to say I slept my way to the top and put in a lackluster performance.” Ouch again.

“Long distance from Kyatt? That says flattering things about me.” Interesting how a man could _feel_ someone roll their eyes when he was holding them. “I mean you’re a good journalist. I admire that. That story you covered last year about the flooding on the south island was some damned fine reporting.”

“Damned selective reporting, you mean.”

“Discreet. Nothing was a lie, and yet you avoided breaking several imperial laws current at the time. I didn’t even suspect that they might have been using magic in their recovery efforts, and neither did anyone else who read it.”

“Mental sciences,” she corrected, seeming to say it with her attention on something else entirely.

“So you kissed me because I’m a good reporter,” she said after a moment, the warm caress of her breath on his neck not matching her voice. “What did you do for the fellow who won the award for excellence in journalism last year?”

Why, Deret thought, could he never be attracted to stupid women? The kind you took on a picnic in the forest and listened to them comment on the exceptionally large broccoli around them. But, no, the women he found attractive had to lead elite mercenary forces or be professionally and habitually perceptive. 

For one fleeting — very fleeting — instant, he wished that he might talk to Maldynado and access his vast store of knowledge on all things female, but then the memory of Isabel intruded and that urge died. Settling down had made Maldynado turn decidedly eccentric, in a way he had not been before, which was saying something.

Deret had kissed Mirel because — why? He turned away from the principal reason, which was that she had been there in his clothes, smelling like him, as if he had some claim on her that superseded anyone else’s. Even now, their mingled scents were slightly heady, and he wanted to press his lips to the tender, exposed stretch of her neck where the shirt collar sagged, so that he could breathe in the smell of her skin beneath the cologne. But he did not think this possessiveness would be welcome knowledge for Mirel, given that she would suspect the jealousy underlying it and resent it.

And there had also been the sight of her in the lamplight, flushed and her hair gone all to curl as it dried. That was a simple truth, that she had looked like someone he wanted to kiss. Someone he wanted to tell him about her day, and tell her about his, and then kiss her. More than once. 

“It was the curly hair. I really have a thing for girls with curly hair. Especially when they let it down.” To prove his point, he wound one of her curls around his finger, tickling her neck as he did so. She relaxed a little bit more against him. Without thinking, he added, “Amaranthe doesn’t have curly hair.”

Mirel sat up suddenly, pulling her hair out of his hand, and scowled at him.

“Don’t do that,” she said, taut as a bowstring where her back pressed against his arm.

“Do what?” The situation had been improving, he thought, and he was startled by this turn of events.

“That thing where you tell me all the ways I’m not like the woman you’re completely over and not hung up on at all. How me being different is so much better because of what I’m not.”

“I’m not hung up—” He closed his lips on the lie that had been about to come out. Who was the one who had been kissing one woman while thinking about another?

“I’m glad you’re not a liar on top of everything else.” Her face crumpled. “How am I here again? Why am I still sitting on you? I’m smarter than this.”

Again? Apparently he wasn’t the only one with history creeping up on him tonight.

She slid off his lap and started to move away, but before she could get too far, he caught her wrist.

“Mirel, what are you talking about, ‘again’? I’d remember it if we had done this before.”

She tugged against him, but wasn’t strong enough to break his hold. She stood turned away from him, her head bowed, and said, “Let’s just say there’s a Kyattese businessman who decided that Turgonian bronze isn’t to his taste after all, while his very blonde, very submissive ex-wife is.”

Deret nearly recoiled physically. That was _crude._ “Turgonian bronze” was how soldiers without the right sort of officer to set an example referred to women. In his albeit brief career as an officer, he had given more than one even younger soldier a rating for language unbecoming to a representative of the empire, based upon phrases like that. He grit his teeth together, wishing the man was an ocean closer. He was confident he could still remember the words that made mouthy privates shake in their boots.

“He said that to you?” he demanded. “This Kyattese businessman? He used those words?”

“Only the once. The rest of the time he was filling my ear with what an improvement I was over his ex-wife. As it turned out, the improvement was temporary. I’m not doing that again.”

“I’m not him,” Deret said, irked at the implied comparison of himself to the bastard.

“I’m not sure he thought he was what he turned out to be in the end, either,” she said in a harsh voice. Then the fight seemed to go out of her, and he felt a faint tremor move through her arm. “I’m going home. I’ll have your clothes laundered and returned to you.”

She lived near the waterfront, on the other side of the docks from the office. There was no way she could walk home without shoes. The trolleys had stopped running over an hour ago.

“There will be broken glass and trash from the fires all over the pavement on the way to your flat,” he said. “You can’t make it barefoot.”

“I’ll take the long way. I want to go home.” Her voice broke on the last word.

Deret contemplated the possibility that he _was_ a bastard, and found there wasn’t much evidence against the argument at the moment. There probably wasn’t anything he could do to change that impression, but the least he could do was save her the three or four mile walk that going the long way entailed.

“I’ll go to the stand on the corner and hire you a cab. Please, Mirel. Let me do someth—”

“Lady Stonecrest?” called a young voice from the rear of the building. “I’m here with your stuff.”

“That’s Jemmy,” she said. She pulled against his grasp and this time he let her go. His hand felt empty not touching her, and the distance between them was cold.

“I’m hiring you a cab,” he repeated.

She clenched her fists before turning back to him. Her face was smooth and composed and held not a trace of the agitation he was sure was behind it.

“You have a deadline, Mancrest,” she said calmly. “The boys downstairs will be looking for their front-page story. You’d better get it to them.”

She could not have said _mind your own bushel basket_ more effectively if she had taken a half-page ad out in the paper to say it.

Before he could say anything in answer, she stalked off to the corridor leading to the back door, where Jemmy was probably fumbling his way in the dark. After a moment, he heard the clinking of one of the glass shades in the hall as the lamp was lit, followed by the murmur of their voices. He braced his elbows on his knees and lowered his face to his hands while he listened to Mirel accept the delivery. Rust his sodding brain for the worthless lump of meat it was. He supposed he could have achieved the same effect by detailing how he delighted in defaming random citizens, using his powers as a newspaperman. Or by outraging something else she valued. Poured salt in some other wound.

He raised his head and his eyes fell on the completed article sitting on his desk. What was that other thing that Ansel used to say? A reporter could only be happy if he was dead tired, dead drunk, or just plain dead. Neither drunk nor plain dead appealed at the moment, but he could work on dead tired. And he could do it before Mirel came back through the newsroom and had to look at him.

Happiness, though? Deret grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled himself to his feet, waiting for his muscles to stop complaining at being allowed to stiffen from sitting for so long. Happiness was a long way off.

***

“In theory,” Amaranthe asked, as she and Sicarius prepared for bed, “what sort of response can we expect when the news of us being _us_ gets out?”

Sicarius pulled his shirt over his head before answering. After their bath, they had both agreed that they were going stir crazy at having been comparatively idle all day, and had gone up the ladder into the fresh air. It had involved putting on pants, but no one intruded on their privacy as they trained in a clearing among the trees, some distance away from the entrance to the bunker. Later, as they cooled down from their workout, Sicarius had attempted to teach her the basics of woodcraft, how to forage and identify tracks through the woods. This Amaranthe had failed miserably at, still reluctant after all their missions in the wilderness to look at it as anything other than a place in need of paving. She preferred city foraging, which involved locating a promising looking food vendor and then prying sustenance out of her with ranmyas. It was so much more . . . orderly.

“I would be speculating without evidence of a specific plot,” he said.

“But you must have some ideas,” she persisted.

He sighed. Yes, this was a terrible topic to talk about at bedtime, but she wanted to be prepared when they went back into the city in the morning, in case any rumors had leaked out and someone had decided that the early bird got the vengeance worm.

“They will try to exploit you as one of my vulnerabilities, based on the assumption that harming you will harm me or cause me to act in an irrational manner.”

She didn’t question that this first consequence was true. She knew that it was, just as Sicarius being harmed would cause her great pain. The prospect of irrationality, on the other hand, seemed like something that should be addressed. Active threats had to be removed, yes, but if she wasn’t around to keep him in check, Amaranthe didn’t know how active any threats he did remove would be, or if “removing” those he suspected would actually eliminate the threat.

She bit her lip. Keep him in check? He had come so far since he had gone on his killing spree following his discovery of the threat that Forge posed to Sespian. But there was still the issue of their differing priorities when it came to the value of human life, and while she believed her personal ideology had rubbed off on him somewhat, she couldn’t tell how long that would persist in her absence. Or, if she was being honest with herself, her death. That last would probably go a long ways toward eroding any progress he had made, and the thought of a bright future being shut to him filled her with sadness. Not that she wanted him to be unmoved by her death, but if it happened, she wanted him to be able to move on without recriminating himself.

“About that,” she said, sitting down on the single chair and beginning to unlace her boots. “I’m concerned about the, ah, extent of your irrationality should I be endangered and separated from you against my will.”

He paused in the act of folding his shirt and leveled a stare at her.

“You are worried that I will act as I did when I discovered Sespian was in mortal danger,” he said, sounding slightly angry. It was probably a note of how far he had come that she felt not fear, but guilt for making him think she doubted him. Maybe her fears were unfounded. He had behaved incredibly well — for himself — when Pike had held her captive, but she had been there for most of that, and everything he had done had been with her approval if not outright cooperation.

“It’s not so much that,” she said slowly, looking to find time to assemble her thoughts into something intelligible that wouldn’t offend him. “I’ve come to realize how naive my ideals were when we first began our . . . collaboration, though I still regret most of the lives we’ve caused others to lose over the course of our endeavors. That’s a heavy burden for me to bear. I know you understand that.” She tugged off both her boots before continuing, half hoping Sicarius would provide something to fill the silence. He didn’t. She cleared her throat uncomfortably, staring at her knees. “I’m afraid that any actions you take in my absence will remove your chances for future happiness, regardless of whether or not my absence is, er, permanent.”

She didn’t lift her eyes during this statement, but kept them glued to her legs. There was a hole starting in one knee of her pants, and she rubbed at it absently, as if smoothing her fingers over the worn fabric would fill it back in. Like the gap that she had conjured up in their day long, happy accord by introducing this subject. When she had imagined what might occur on her honeymoon as a girl, she hadn’t pictured ending it with the first fight of her married life.

When Sicarius appeared suddenly in front of her, she jumped and then looked up guiltily. In the past months, in consideration of her nerves, he had taken to making some small noise or even occasionally doing something so mundane as knocking on a door to announce himself, and she had forgotten how quickly and silently he could move.

“You must know that any future happiness for me is contingent upon your continued presence in my life,” he said.

At any other time, the statement would have warmed her, and he had said as much last night, but the thought that she might take away any chance of happiness for him by not being there was too sad to contemplate. Every smile, every laugh — well, she hadn’t heard him laugh yet, but she was determine to accomplish it and soon — every eye crinkle was precious to her as a sign of joy in him, and she didn’t want that joy snuffed out in its entirety by anything.

“I would hope that—” She frowned and fidgeted with the developing hole in her pantsleg. “I would hope that not even my death would entirely remove the prospect of happiness from your life.” She hiccuped a laugh. “Diminish it for a time, absolutely. But not remove.”

Sicarius reached down and stilled her hand, kneeling in front of her. He wrapped his hand around hers and rubbed his thumb across her knuckles. Soothing her.

“The thought of you sad or angry or just _blank_ forever makes me very sad. You have such capacity for goodness. I don’t want you to lose that, whether I’m around or not.” She tightened her grasp on his hand. “I love you. I’m not always prepared for the ways in which that love expresses itself.”

“Neither am I,” he said dryly. His eyes crinkled. Oh, her heart.

“You know that it is foolish to worry over things which have shown no sign of occurring,” he continued, more seriously. “It is not productive.”

“Yes, but I find that you somewhat cloud my otherwise clear and boundless wisdom.”

He snorted softly. He knew the limits of her wisdom and had probably projected its exact boundaries at some point since their meeting. No doubt they disagreed on the area contained within those boundaries.

“To address your concerns, since Forge’s fall, the other factions opposed to me have withdrawn their forces. They are probably floundering, trying to assess the new terrain which is presented to them.” He met her gaze, calm and confident. “We have time to prepare for many different scenarios, but the most powerful weapon we possess is to remain vigilant at all times.”

She nodded reluctantly. Constant vigilance — not her favorite.

“I won’t ask you to make any promises you can’t keep,” she said, “but I would appreciate it if you kept me informed of any plans or developments. Even if you think I shouldn’t be aware of them. Especially if you think I shouldn’t be.”

“Of course,” he said easily. “Even if your cooperation would not be necessary for any plan to succeed, your plotting has become indispensable to me.”

That beggared belief.

“Indispensable?” she repeated.

“We are stronger together than opposed,” he said, very serious and without a trace of amusement. “We temper each other.”

She smiled and stroked his cheek, rough with his days-end beard. They were and did, incredibly enough. He turned his head and kissed her palm, and they sat for a while in happy communion. After a time, Sicarius released her hand and rested both forearms on her thighs.

“That is not all which concerns you,” he said, looking up at her.

When had he become so perceptive of what she had inside her? Had it really been from nearly the very beginning? Or was she just that transparent?

“I know you think that the team was unaffected by us being together, however much we weren’t—” here a glint entered his eyes, probably as he remembered the many arguments she had made in favor of them “—but it actually did cause some dissent which you weren’t privy to.”

The glint disappeared to be replaced by what she had come to recognize as confusion.

“Of what do you speak?”

“Books warned me off you a time or two. Even if I thought you were were in my best interest, he didn’t.” She smiled wryly. “I appreciate the interest he took in me, if the way he showed it somewhat less. He may very well be unhappy with this turnabout.”

“I believe I attempted the same on several occasions,” he said, as if the disapproval of someone they interacted with on a daily basis did not phase him, which it probably didn’t. What he said next, though, surprised her. “Basilard will approve.”

“What?” Basilard had been one of her larger concerns among the team, given Sicarius’s history with the Mangdorian people. He and Sicarius might have struck up something of a rapport, but she hadn’t thought it extended so far as to envision Sicarius as capable of a normal life. Or as normal as a life with her would get.

“He says you humanize me.” His voice turned dry. “It was not said with resentment.”

Huh. She hadn’t thought their discussions about forgiveness and redemption had made that much of an impression.

“So,” she said, “that’s one out of six in favor of us. Or, two, rather. I can’t imagine that Yara will wish us ill or quit in disgust. As for the others . . .” She trailed off, thinking. “Who knows how Akstyr will respond. It will either be complete indifference or feigned indifference. The most likely response will be relief that I didn’t make him wash the grease out of his hair and put on clothes that actually fit him for a public wedding.”

Sicarius grunted. Akstyr’s thoughts on their marriage probably weren’t a very high priority for him, but she cared. She cared about all the members of the team and didn’t relish the thought that any of them might be distressed or alienated forever by one of her actions. Of course, she would work to talk them around to seeing things her way, and she was confident she could do it, but she didn’t look forward to it.

“As for Maldynado . . .” She cringed. Maldynado still viewed her as a sort of pet project, and had been giving her advice on how to obtain the happiness he had found with Yara. None of the suggestions included Sicarius. “It should be interesting,” she finished.

“It always is with Maldynado,” Sicarius said, somewhat disdainfully. He had not been unaware of Maldynado’s efforts to arrange dates for her with the military officers who had taken to trailing after her. She was an intriguing little riddle to them, a woman with a taste for military matters. She wasn’t sure if they wanted to examine her like an interesting artifact, or to follow the more traditional route of a dinner and wine to discover a woman’s secrets.

“It does come as a relief to me that you want to make this public finally,” she said lightly. “Major Tenebrik has been quizzing me on my favorite flowers lately.” Major Tenebrik was a traditionalist. “I finally told him that I had always preferred knives to flowers. A bouquet of daggers might be waiting for me when we get back.”

“Do you have a favorite?” Sicarius asked.

“Dagger? I’ve always liked poniards. That’s a ladylike blade, and more useful than a stiletto.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I meant flower.”

How embarrassing. At least she knew that her answer did not surprise him, which did not go for anyone else who could possibly ask her that question. And he didn’t view Major Tenebrik as competition, thank every one of her ancestors.

“Not really,” she answered. “They don’t last long once they’re cut. I’d rather have pastries from Curi’s.”

Sicarius ducked his head a little to hide what might have been a grin. Yes, that’s right, hubby, she thought. You are not my only insatiable appetite.

“Aren’t you interested in the sixth member of our group?” she asked.

He bent his head lower.

“Sespian,” he sighed. Here was his anxiety.

“He didn’t respond well when I turned him down.” That had been one of the larger drawbacks of keeping a lid on on their relationship. Sespian had pursued her right up until she had laid things out for him, neatly leaving Sicarius out of the explanation, because whether or not she was interested in someone else had been irrelevant when she hadn’t been interested in him. Stepmother to a young man who had once pursued her romantically. Oh, boy. This was an argument against having children at a precocious age that you didn’t often encounter.

“He had not met the Starcrest girl at that point,” he pointed out, “and he respects you.”

“That will help,” she acknowledged, “but what could have been never really leaves us.”

“Yes,” he breathed. Missed opportunities probably bit into Sicarius more deeply than others. More strongly he said, “Dwelling on it now will not change whatever his reaction will be.”’

“Not productive, I know. But we should probably be prepared for a negative one when we tell him. And we should probably tell him before anyone else. He deserves it.” 

“Agreed.”

That was that resolved. Tomorrow would be a busy day. They should probably turn in and get a good night’s rest before heading back to the city and then letting a whole clowder of cats out of the bag. But it wasn’t that late, and he was still exclusively hers for a while longer.

“Out of curiosity,” she said, trailing a stocking foot up the outside of his thigh, “why are you still wearing pants? I thought it was something you were opposed to.”

Sicarius raised his head, an expression she could identify very well on his face. And it wasn’t annoyance.

“I was informed they were necessary for going out of doors,” he said.

“I don’t know who could have possibly told you that,” she said teasingly. “We’re not outside now.” She raised her knees and squeezed him around the middle while waggling her eyebrows suggestively.

“We are not,” he agreed, but didn’t make any move to stand up or do anything else. Just knelt there with his arms draped across her thighs and looked at her with his dark eyes smoldering with intensity. Which was frustrating. For her. He seemed to be enjoying it.

Amaranthe crossed her ankles behind his back and drew him closer. He obligingly rose up on his knees and braced himself with a hand on either side of the back of the chair, effectively caging her in place — not that he was going anywhere with her legs wrapped around his waist. She had him right where she wanted him.

“Promises were made, bed friend,” she tried to growl, but failed due to the laughter in her throat.

Sicarius closed his eyes and his lips moved silently as he repeated the offending word. And that was too much for her to resist. It was as close as she was ever going to get to surprising him with a kiss or anything else. But he still sensed it coming, and when their lips met, it wasn’t the sort of kiss that their positions might suggest. Tender, not raw. I’m sorry, it said on both their parts, that I can’t be perfect for you. I’m going to mess up. I’ll fix it when I do.

“Bed?” Amaranthe asked, tipping her head toward the pallet when they pulled apart. No other questions needed to be asked — they communicated so well without words.

He shook his head and ran his hands down her body, hitting several sensitive spots along the way, until he reached the buttons on her fly and started to undo them. No bed? Amaranthe frowned, until he slipped a hand inside her unbuttoned pants and pressed a kiss to the underside of her jaw at the same time. Oh. _Oh._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ms. Maple and the paper. Sespian and Starcrests and marriage announcements, oh my. The _Gazette_ conspires against Deret, but mostly Deret conspires against himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Meera and Moon for offering comments on the second scene, and to Meera and sweartoad for offering comments on the Deret scene. I would still be staring blankly at the screen if it wasn't for you all! Also thanks to Moon for the lending of her OC. Hopefully I have committed no great atrocities with her!

Inside her office at the Mildawn Business School for Women, Ms. Maple spread the day's paper on her desk. The front page story in the _Gazette_ had caught her eye as she bustled past the newsstand that morning, and now that she had it laid out in front of her, it didn't seem any more believable.

SICARIUS WEDS LOKDON read the headline blazoned across the top of the page in inch-high letters. Below that in smaller type was _Will the former fugitive be able to find domestic bliss with the former enforcer?_ And below both those things was an engraving she could only assume was an artist's reconstruction, because she just could not picture Amaranthe Lokdon wearing _that_ expression over any man, no matter how far down his chest his shirt was opened. She had been such a sensible girl and not at all given to flightiness, unlike some others that could be named. That Myll girl . . . Ms. Maple clucked her tongue. She had always been beside herself with stress at the end of each term, and look how that had turned out.

Ms. Maple's frown grew as she read further in the article. It all seemed so out of character. She knew that Ms. Lokdon had fallen in with something like the criminal element, but a good businesswoman worked with the resources she had available to her. Now Ms. Lokdon was a hero, as so many from Mildawn ended up, if only somebody would notice. But there was a glaring omission in the article which Ms. Maple did not like at all.

"Whatever happened to Hansor and little Jaeleka?" she murmured aloud when she reached the end of the article with no mention of either her former student's first husband or daughter. Shaking her head, she set the paper aside and resolved to send the newlywed couple a potted fern in congratulations, regardless of what facts a bunch of journalists saw fit to leave out of a woman's life. She would have to question her usual sources to discover the true story.

***

Amaranthe felt strangely self-conscious walking back through the gates of the Barracks. The guards regarded them with the usual suspicious scrutiny, and it seemed like they should be able to read the momentous change in her life written across her face, if not Sicarius’s. Part of her wanted to mention it as she passed by — to say something very subtle, like “Gentlemen, my husband!” and then twirl in front of the gate while grinning maniacally — but she suspected that as much as Sicarius wanted their relationship to be legitimized in front of the empire, he hadn’t meant to do it by informing the guards minutes before the watch changed at dawn. That would spread the news faster than any other method, and there was no need for Sespian to find out before they even made it to his door.

She bit back a smile. The guards probably wouldn’t appreciate the display, either. Let the new watch deal with the crazy woman.

“Did you smell the smoke as we came through the streets?” she asked Sicarius, walking beside her. She had noticed it earlier, but had dismissed it as smoke from people’s morning fires, until they drew closer to the lake and it grew stronger.

“It’s from yesterday.” 

His previous garrulousness had disappeared as soon as the cover to the entrance of his hideaway had been slipped back in place. Though he had led her by the hand through to obstacle course which led away from the entrance, their return had been conducted in silence. Like the smoke, his usual reserve had grown stronger the closer they came to the Barracks.

“There was a lot of it to linger into today,” she countered. She put an extra bounce into her next step, nearly skipping and unable to stop herself. “Something big happened while we were gone.”

He didn’t say anything, though when she glanced at him, there was something like amusement on his face, albeit a small measure. She’d take it.

“Do you think it was something inimical? Just because Forge is gone doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plotters out there, waiting to be foiled. By us.” She smiled winningly at him, and he slanted her a look which was distinctly warmer than any he had given her before yesterday in situations like these. This marriage thing suited her perfectly — she hoped she had the restraint not to abuse her newfound powers.

Sicarius opened the garden door for her and followed her through before answering.

“I smelled no accelerant.”

Huh. He could smell that?

“It could have been a practitioner,” she suggested. “No need to pour kerosene everywhere for that, and it would fit with who’s caused trouble before.”

“There has been no suggestion of a group using the mental sciences within the city in recent intelligence reports, and the most likely to do so would have nothing to gain by burning dockside warehouses.”

“How do you know what burnt?”

“A shipment of spices from Nuria arrived in the harbor the day before yesterday. The smoke stank of it.” His voice turned dry. “Did you not read the report on harbor activity that afternoon?”

She had not. She had been waiting for him to tell her about it over dinner with the team, because he always did, and his summaries were much more direct than the official reports. But then he asked her to go on a mission with him, and she had gotten significantly distracted by . . . developments.

“I, ah, must have skimmed over that part,” she said, and he snorted softly. Apparently her newfound powers were not all that powerful. “But still, practitioners are a possibility.”

“We will look into it after we speak to Sespian,” he said. The reserve which had lifted slightly during their conversation returned, and she reached out to squeeze his hand. After a moment he returned the pressure, but dropped her hand after. His back was even stiffer than usual, and she wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, either. Possibly even less than the one with the team that was to follow.

As Amaranthe and Sicarius approached the doors to Sespian’s rooms, the guards stationed in the hall shuffled uneasily. Beside her, Sicarius became even more tense. His face was grim and dark. This behavior was a serious breach of their training — the empire demanded absolute, immobile attention at all times from the emperor’s personal guards, and nothing but a threat should change that. Sicarius was no longer classified as one — at least to the emperor himself. Those set against Sespian still had something to worry about.

Both their worst fears were confirmed when, a few steps from the doors, Sespian’s valet rounded the corner with a stack of towels in his arms. His eyes grew round and his mouth dropped opened as he recognized them. He crushed the towels to his chest and started running down the hall, one hand extended pleadingly.

“No!” he cried in a thin, panicked voice. “Don’t go in there!”

Sicarius jerked his head toward the valet before leaping to the door and kicking it open with a single blow beneath the latch. By the time it thudded against the interior wall, Amaranthe had the valet pressed face first against the plaster, his arms jerked behind him and the towels scattered across the floor. The guards didn’t make a move to help or hinder her.

“It’s not what you think,” the valet mumbled against the wall.

“It could be lots of things.” Some angry warrior-caste family, a foreign power, a domestic one, an international group — the list went on. She’d be surprised if the ones on her mental list weren’t responsible for this occurrence. If there was anything she had learned since Forge’s downfall, it was that the factions set against the empire were limitless, while the ones with the power to strike against the emperor were most definitely finite. Not few in number. It just wasn’t all of them.

“Yes,” the valet agreed, “but it’s not what you think.”

As Amaranthe tried to puzzle out what the man could possibly think she thought it was, one of the guards by the door snickered. She twisted her head around to look at the guard, and his snickers broke off as his captain glared at him. A smile remained, though, and Amaranthe glanced at the other guards lining the hall. Many of them were wearing some variety of grin or smirk, and all but the captain had quivering lips and glinting eyes.

Huh. If this was an assassination attempt, then she hoped it involved some trick of the Science to be making the guards act like this. She didn’t want to imagine what sort of group would recruit men who would snicker over the death of the man they’d been guarding for the past six months or more.

“Lokdon.” Sicarius’s voice drifted from the suite. “Come here.”

“Should I bring the valet?” she called back. The single eye she could see belonging to the man in question widened in horror and he shook his head vigorously. _What_ was going on?

“Release him.”

If Sicarius thought he posed no threat, then he didn’t. She let the valet go and left him wagging his arms to get the blood back into them. She bit her lip. Maybe Sicarius had taught her that move a little too well.

“What’s going on?” she asked as she entered the suite. “The guards are practically gigg— _oh.”_

Holding a dagger in one hand and standing on the other side of the sofa between himself and his father, Sespian was wearing only pajama bottoms and an expression of guilt. Instead of looking like an emperor, he looked like a boy caught sneaking another pastry off the plate. And peering over the top of the sofa, visible only to the end of her nose, was Thalia Starcrest.

“Oh no,” she croaked and disappeared from view.

Sespian’s valet had been right. It certainly wasn’t what Amaranthe had thought.

She shut the doors behind her, and thankfully, following its kicking, the latch held. No need to give the guards more to laugh about. Turning her back also gave her an opportunity to get her face under control. She needed it.

When she turned back around and joined Sicarius several paces inside the room, Sespian glanced at her for one chagrined second and then occupied himself with putting the dagger away in a sheath he pulled out from behind a sofa cushion. She could only imagine what had passed between Sespian and Sicarius when Sicarius had entered the room unannounced. Looks which had spoken volumes, no doubt.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Sespian said, bending down to snag something pale off the floor. It dangled from his fingers as he stood, and resolved itself into a lady’s nightgown, a rather delicate one. He hesitated. “Could you turn around until I say?”

“Yes!” Amaranthe whipped around again with alacrity, while Sicarius managed a more sedate and dignified turn.

As she tried not to listen to the whispered conversation going on behind them, she studied Sicarius from the corner of her eye. He was staring ahead at the wall, arms folded across his chest — nothing out of the usual. She nudged him and raised an eyebrow slightly. He looked down at her, raised one hand and opened his mouth as if to say something, but in the end, only shook his head wordlessly. Not what he had expected either, she supposed.

“All right,” Sespian said. “We’re, ah, decent.”

He and Thalia, now wearing the nightgown and Sespian wearing his pajama top, were holding hands and looking faintly nervous. Thalia’s spectacles were caught in her curls, and she fidgeted with them until they were settled in place while they all stared at each other. Amaranthe wished she had something to fiddle with herself, but felt the occasion was wrong to stick her fingers in her mouth. She settled for tapping a finger against her thigh. Sicarius, of course, stood stock still beside her and gave no sign of being antsy in the least, though he wasn’t at ease.

The awkwardness built in the room until Amaranthe and Sespian both blurted at once, “We have something to tell you.”

Sespian recovered before she did

“You go first,” he said. “I’m sure your news is important, for you to show up this early.”

Amaranthe eyeballed the young couple’s joined hands. She had the feeling their news was pretty similar to whatever those two were going to announce.

Sicarius surprised her when he settled his arm around her shoulders, as light and tentative as a bird. She tilted her head up and saw that some of his mask had slipped, and she wasn’t certain if it was intentional or if he couldn’t help it at that moment. She stretched her arm across his body to snag his other hand and squeeze it reassuringly. “Go ahead,” she whispered. He took a breath, released it, and smiled at her.

At this exchange, Sespian and Thalia looked as if a long dead ancestor had appeared before them and was delivering pronouncements. 

“Amaranthe and I were married,” Sicarius said slowly. She could hear his heart in his voice, and she hoped that Sespian could hear it, too. “She is my wife.”

“What?” Sespian choked out. “When?” His brow furrowed. _“How?”_

“We got married the day before yesterday at the imperial records office,” Amaranthe clarified. “As to how, Sicarius asked me, I said yes, and we signed the forms. So, the usual way.”

Sespian’s brow furrowed further.

“You were in the Barracks the day before yesterday until after the records office closes.” He winced and closed his eyes briefly as he realized what their evening must have entailed. “No, don’t give me details. Unless it involved destruction of imperial property, in which case I’ll need to hear about it.”

“Ah, yes,” Amaranthe said. “That part was a little less usual, but everything else was entirely legal. And binding. With no destruction of anyone’s property whatsoever.”

“It was unprecedented,” Sicarius said dryly.

For the first time, Sespian smiled. Whatever tension had been in the room dissipated.

“On multiple levels,” he returned, equally as dry. “I’ve come to know you both fairly well.”

“Congratulations,” Thalia said. She had been observing the exchange with a sober face, but now she smiled and blushed. Amaranthe could not remember ever being that young. Reverend ancestors, they were both so young. Sicarius hadn’t been wrong last night when he had called her “the Starcrest girl”. The situation suddenly seemed less amusing.

“We were hoping that you would give us your blessing,” Thalia continued. “Both of you. Sespian told me . . . everything last night.”

Oh, yes. The situation was no longer amusing. Sicarius’s hand tightened on hers, and she felt his heart pick up beneath where her shoulder was pressed against his chest. He and she would have to unpack this moment later.

“I took advantage of your, ah, absence yesterday to ask Thalia to marry me,” Sespian said. He raised their joined hands, and Amaranthe saw that the signet ring he usually wore on his littlest finger was on Thalia’s ring finger. Imperial seal. This was very serious, then. Imperial signets really weren’t something that were given away lightly, and she didn’t think Sespian was that stupid.

Thalia leaned against Sespian, and it was disturbing how readily he leaned back. They were in a relationship, yes, but everyone had apparently overlooked how serious it was. Apple blossom love, she had thought, strong while it lasted, but brief. _Slow down,_ Amaranthe wanted to say, until she realized she was the worst kind of hypocrite. Hadn’t she left Mildawn and entered enforcer academy at Thalia’s age? Against her father’s wishes? And her father would not have approved of Sicarius in the least.

Beside her Sicarius stirred.

“You are very young,” he said in his usual flat tone. He dropped her hand, but kept his arm loosely around her shoulders. Good. Now probably wasn’t the time for him to retreat behind a stone face or burst into a rage. “To marry now would put you both in a vulnerable position.”

Sespian looked annoyed. Neither she nor Sicarius were probably in a position to criticize anyone on the grounds of unwise decisions made in youth. Or possibly about marrying in haste.

“We weren’t planning on getting married right away,” Thalia said before Sespian could say anything. “I need — _want_ to finish university in the islands, and Sespian doesn’t want me to give that up for him.” She blushed again. “And I wouldn’t, even if he asked me to.”

“I already told you I wouldn’t ask,” Sespian said, sounding scandalized at the prospect. He turned to address Sicarius. “I know that the situation here in Turgonia is not exactly stable, and I would never knowingly place Thalia in danger. But she’s going back to Kyatt at the end of the summer, and —”

He was cut off by shouts just outside the door. Sicarius’s hand dropped to the dagger on his belt, but he did not move away from her, probably preparing to shove her out of danger if need be.

“No, sir! You can’t go in there!” the captain of the guard shouted. “Those are the emperor’s private rooms. He won’t want to be interrupted now. He’s in a private conference with . . .” The captain trailed off and then finished hollowly, “Very many people.”

“Captain, I received reports of an altercation in the emperor’s rooms, and I intend to ascertain his wellbeing personally.” The speaker’s voice dropped. “If I have to go through you to do it.”

Amaranthe knew that voice. They all knew that voice.

Thalia cringed and pressed her forehead against Sespian’s shoulder.

“That’s my father,” she mumbled into his sleeve.

Sespian stroked her hair.

“We had to tell them sooner or later.”

“I know,” she sighed. “I had just hoped we would be . . . dressed.”

The doors burst open at that point, rather as they must have when Sicarius had kicked them in. Commander of the Armies Starcrest and Professor Komitopis stood framed in it for a second, blocking the captain’s view of the interior. The commander’s eyes widened at the sight of Amaranthe and Sicarius standing together, and then narrowed as he took in his daughter, who was arguably in Sespian’s arms. He mouthed her name silently. Beside him, Professor Komitopis’s lips were trembling much as the guards’ had been earlier in the hall, and she took the initiative of shooing her husband in and closing the doors behind him.

“Thalia,” she said a little breathlessly, “what is going on here?”

“Did we not have a conversation about avoiding this very situation?” Starcrest added, not unkindly but in a distinctly fatherly tone.

Sespian paled, but then firmed his jaw. Determination sparked in his eyes.

“Sicarius and I got married,” Amaranthe said hastily, not wanting to see how this conversation was going to develop. “We came to tell Sespian before anybody else.”

This distracted everyone admirably. A broad smile broke across Starcrest’s face.

“At last!” The commander advanced toward them, a hand extended. “I knew as soon as I saw you together that this would happen. I only wondered that it took you so long to come to it.”

“It was a struggle for him not to say anything,” Professor Komitopis said, amused, while her husband clasped Sicarius’s shoulder and beamed at him.

“I have difficulty containing my enthusiasm on subjects I am deeply invested in,” he admitted.

Starcrest followed Turgonian wedding tradition by kissing Amaranthe soundly on both cheeks. Amaranthe’s head reeled slightly when he released her. It was a little bit like being attacked by a friendly and fiercely intelligent puppy, or a wave of pure, energized personality. Despite the years under his belt, Starcrest could be decidedly boyish when he chose to be. And she could not imagine anyone else reacting in so positive a fashion to this news.

Professor Komitopis was a little more subdued in her congratulations, coming forward to shake both their hands and wish them a happy future. This threatened tears again for Amaranthe — she knew that the professor held a deeply seated reticence toward Sicarius which would not be relieved. What was more, Sicarius accepted the small gesture, even if he did not thank her for it. Amaranthe thought he might have been too bewildered to refuse.

The relief was short-lived, however, because the Starcrests turned immediately back to Sespian and Thalia, who had been standing quietly in the background, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

“There are many things we do when we are twenty that we come to regret later,” Starcrest said thoughtfully, studying Sespian and then shifting his attention to Thalia. She looked back at him resolutely. “This will take considerable maneuvering for a successful outcome.”

“We have a plan, sir.” Sespian stood straight, meeting Starcrest’s eyes. “We aren’t rushing into this. When given the opportunity, I prefer to be methodical.”

“Hmm. We will discuss your methods, as well as your intentions.”

“Both honorable,” Sespian said, sounding irked at the implication that they might not be. Sicarius bristled at the same implication.

“Would you like me to stay?” Sicarius asked.

Some of Sespian’s determination slackened when his father spoke. There was something in his face that suggested he would like it if Sicarius and Amaranthe would stay, as if he knew that at least one of them would back him up out of total and unbending preference. Not to deliver the world to him on a platter, but to simply stand behind him and offer support.

“No, thank you,” he said at last, a trace of reluctance still there. “This is something for me to do on my own.” A smile tipped up on corner of his mouth, and he tugged Thalia a little closer to him. “For us to do together, rather.”

Sicarius nodded.

“Carry on,” he said with a faint smile to Sespian, which Amaranthe knew carried meaning that the words couldn’t convey. _I approve, I am proud of you, I trust you to resolve this on your own._ He might as well have told him to be careful. 

“Thank you.” Sespian understood. He nodded a little as well, almost hiding the nervous swallow. “We can discuss this later.” It sounded halfway between a question and a statement — an offer which had to be accepted or refused. A door left halfway open.

“Of course.” Sicarius’s eyes crinkled at the corners minutely.

Amaranthe lifted a hand in farewell and followed behind Sicarius as he exited.

Faintly through the door, Amaranthe heard Tikaya asking, “What about your education? The emperor can’t move to Kyatt.” Sespian said, “Please, ma’am, call me Sespian,” and Thalia responded with something about a long engagement. Amaranthe touched Sicarius lightly on the arm and hustled to put some distance between them and the door, so they wouldn’t have to overhear a conversation that wasn’t any of their business until someone made it so. Anything on this subject should come directly from Sespian, and she knew that Sicarius had developed no compunctions about eavesdropping in the past few months. 

“You thought it would be awkward,” Sicarius said when they were around the corner and out of earshot of the guards, with no sign of anybody else nearby.

“It _was_ awkward,” Amaranthe insisted. “Just not in the way I expected.” She smiled and laughed a little, thinking of all the times Sespian had mentioned having a plan. Every plan she had ever made had had to be adjusted as she went along, but the fact that he was willing to share it with the commander of the armies suggested that it might feature fewer explosions than her average plan. She hoped for both of them it did. “Good for Sespian.”

“I am proud of him.”

She tipped her head on the side and studied him. Other than the pleased tone to his voice, there was nothing to suggest why, though there were many possible options.

“Because he’s found a good woman to stand by him or because he met you with a dagger in his hand?” _Or because he almost asked you to stay?_

“Yes,” he said, sounding even more pleased, this time with himself.

Amaranthe’s eyes narrowed.

“Some day I will learn not to ask you questions like that, dumpling,” she said, deadpan.

He released a tiny sigh, and Amaranthe grinned.

 

***

Deret viewed the front page of the _Gazette_ with a sense of dull horror. The engravers last night had not been quite done with the engraving to accompany the story, and so he had left it in what he presumed to be the capable hands of the department head, while he went home to sleep poorly. Relko had never failed him before, and Deret had assumed that the engravers were preparing fresh plates of Amaranthe’s and Sicarius’s mugshots. The old ones had been printed so many times they no longer gave crisp impressions. He had not been expecting . . . _this._

If only he had remembered that Relko’s previous employer had been the publishing house which printed the Lady Dourcrest novels. The man was harkening to his past, which normally Deret appreciated out of a sense of tradition, but he could not appreciate this totally unimaginable tableau. There wasn’t room in that office for a fan to blow Amaranthe’s hair around or to make her squint like that, and he doubted Sicarius had ever worn a shirt that puffy. Especially not in that color. It was not black. It appeared to be the opposite. It appeared to be white.

And Deret was definitely not responsible for that subhead — former fugitive and former enforcer? Domestic _bliss?_ He placed the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of the copy editor who checked the proofs and suggested the headlines. No doubt they were both enjoying this story and had not entered into it with the seriousness journalism required. He frowned. Required at _all_ times, even for articles that seemed ridiculous.

“Emperor’s left and right nut,” he muttered under his breath. “The entire rusting paper is conspiring against me.”

He resisted tossing the paper in the bin beside his desk and settled down to read the rest of his section in preparation for the writers’ meeting in an hour. Below the fold was Mirel’s story, and it was, as always, excellent. It annoyed him all over again that he hadn’t been able to put it above the fold in the morning edition, as well as the evening. But the follow-up on it would make a nice front-page story for later in the week, he realized, and she could have that. The enforcers should be ready to make some statements in the next couple days.

Ink sputtered on the page he was taking notes on as he pressed his pen too tightly against the paper. Giving Mirel stories because he felt guilty over what had happened between them was something he couldn’t do, not if he wanted to consider himself any kind of newsman. It was hers by rights, though. She had broken the story, and she had the contacts with the officials investigating it. It would be stupid to give it to anyone else, and he was not showing undue preference by continuing to let a woman he was interested in cover the story she had broken. It would be the same if it were on the front page or a single column inch buried next to the obituaries.

Deret threw away the ruined pen nib and rifled through a drawer for one that wasn’t split. There was the reason he had slept poorly last night — the realization that kissing her hadn’t been something fueled only by brandy and inky black curls. Mirel had been part of his life for years, but not as a person to kiss. When he first started at the paper, she had already been there for several years and something of a rising star. He had been learning to navigate the city with a cane and a leg that had still occasionally made him lie awake in a cold sweat of pain. Angry and disinclined to take notice of anyone who had seemed happy, he had noticed Mirel anyway.

It had been hard not to. She was singled out for praise by Ansel in writers meetings frequently, and even his own father had remarked on her. Of course, Deret’s father called her “that Stonecrest fellow” and still seemed to think her name was Marl, but he had noticed her articles. Once Deret had graduated from the licensing hall beat and entered the ranks of the regular reporters, she gave him exactly as much respect and deference as she gave the rest of them, which wasn’t much at all. Most of the reporters had treated him with wariness — paper owner’s son, recently returned war hero, chip on his shoulder the size of an ag district — but Mirel and a few others had treated him as just another cub reporter who needed a considerable amount of grief before he knew what he was doing. Which he had.

Then Ansel had put her name up for the correspondent’s position at the Kyatt bureau, and she left. With her gone, Ansel had taken Deret under his wing and taught him the finer points of the business, along with some of the coarser ones. The few times she had returned to visit, they had fallen back into comfortable camaraderie, as if she had only been gone for a day or two, and not months at a time. The news and Mirel. They ran side by side in his head. He couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t.

His fingers closed on a new package of nibs shoved to the back of the drawer, and he shook one out into his palm. Mirel had been . . . a co-worker seemed inadequate, and a mentor wasn’t quite right. A friend maybe, which was probably the most accurate term he could find, but there had always been something _more_ there. This frisson of something that he couldn’t identify. It wasn’t anything he could ever imagine feeling for a sister, if he should have had one. Not lust. He was familiar enough with that.

He frowned and dipped his fresh pen in the inkwell. Lust was definitely a possibility now. Mirel in his shirt had made that very clear, and kissing her had made it unavoidable. 

But he had a plan for getting out of this tangle. It involved groveling. And then he would ask her out for dinner or drinks — _not_ to The Pirate’s Plunder, where his father thought he should take that Stonecrest fellow carousing — and they would see how things went from there. Deret bowed his head to hide a smile the rest of the newsroom shouldn’t see and started jotting notes again. Another kiss or two wouldn’t go amiss, but part of him was thinking on the scale of thousands.

Forty minutes later, the prospect of kisses from Mirel being in his future faded. He caught sight of her at the back of the group of the reporters gathering in front of his desk, and she looked like she had slept about as well as he had. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark smudges underneath, and there was a tired furrow between her brows. In her hand was probably what was one in a long series of cups of coffee. Cream, no sugar, Kyattese double roast. He knew how she took it.

What told him that kisses were unlikely, though, was her hair. Instead of the usual mass of wild curls, bound at the nape of her neck with a ribbon, she had drawn it all back in a tight braid. The top was smooth and flat, as if she had applied pomade with a trowel. There wasn’t a single tendril allowed to escape around her face, and the severity of the hairstyle did nothing to relieve the tense set of her shoulders and body. That was a message to him.

Mirel glanced his way and caught him staring. Hurt flashed in her eyes. She turned quickly away to greet the reporter who had come to stand beside her, one of the older writers who had been there nearly as long as both of them were alive. He squeezed her on the upper arm in a fatherly way, and over the early morning buzz of the newsroom, Deret heard him say something about not burning the candle at both ends. Mirel forced a smile and answered him back, her grip so tight on the handle of her cup the color was pressed from her knuckles.

Deret groaned inwardly. He knew he had messed up, but he had thought there was a chance of fixing it today. Doubt was making itself known on that account.

“Morning, gang,” he said, wanting to get this over with. The reporters assembled in front of him stopped buzzing and all eyes focused on him. Except Mirel, who stared at the pencil cup on his desk so nobody would notice she wasn’t looking at him. Ancestors.

“Hey, great story, boss,” one of the men burst out. “What a break! Whole city’s buzzing about it .”

“Yeah, old glum-gullet Tanikson at the Imperial Standard must be pissing himself over missing the scoop on this one!” someone else said. “Nearly everyone I passed on the street had a copy.”

“Good to see you writing again,” Lirial, one of the other women on his reporting staff, called over the chatter of agreement that followed.

“Good to see you back off the rusting adjectives,” the old blade standing next to Mirel said dryly. 

The rest of his staff laughed at this. Mirel sipped her coffee.

Deret put on a smile he hoped wasn’t too wooden and held up his hands to get them to quiet down again.

“Thank you,” he said. “Credit goes to Bern for finding it in the first place. He’s responsible for much of the reporting on the story. I just strung it all together and wrote it down. He also got a promotion out of it, so congratulations to him.”

Slouched beside the solid breadth of Venzlas, Bern straightened and grinned as he received a smattering of applause and a few remarks of “good work, lad”. At least the other person he had outraged yesterday seemed to not hold him in utter contempt.

“If anyone hasn’t yet,” Deret continued, “be sure to read Mirel’s story on the warehouse fires yesterday. And then there’s Rocky’s piece on the proposed reforms for the enforcers on page two. Well done, both of you.” She smiled weakly at the people who looked her way, while Rocky preened. Deret would leave it at that, and not try to flatter her into unbending. He ran through his critique of the paper and finished, “Who has story ideas for me? Don’t be shy. I want to hear them.”

He spent the rest of the meeting accepting or rejecting ideas, handing out assignments, and listening to progress reports on ongoing assignments. He didn’t bother asking Mirel directly about her assignments and she didn’t volunteer any information, so he had a reason to ask her to stay behind, which she did with a face that didn’t give away anything but that she was tired. Maybe she was too tired to manage anything else. Maybe he should skip what he was planning to say and tell her to go home and rest.

Deret swallowed. No, he wasn’t a coward. He owed her an apology — he wanted to apologize. He just didn’t want to stick his foot down his throat again.

“Mirel, about last night,” he began when all the other reporters had filtered away to their desks or wherever else their assignments took them. Mirel had come forward to stand next to his desk, pretty much where she had been standing when things had started to go wrong.

“Stonecrest,” she said.

“What?” Deret felt his upper lip lift in disbelief. They had been on a first-name basis since he had started at the paper.

“You’re my boss, not my friend.” She folded her arms across her waist, hands on her upper arms. “You can call me Stonecrest like everyone else does.”

“I call the other reporters by their first names all the time.”

She shrugged one shoulder, as if totally unaffected by this fact.

“That’s between you and them. The chief doesn’t call me Mirel, the bureau chief in Kyatt didn’t, and now you can join them.”

Being rebuffed like this stung more than he liked to admit. A door was swinging closed somewhere, and he needed to be on the other side before it shut completely.

“All right. Well.” He took his spectacles off and polished them on his tie. When he was done, he settled them back in place and cleared his throat. “I just wanted to apologize for what happened last night. It was a mistake.”

Her brows snapped together.

“Mistake?” she repeated flatly.

Belatedly, he realized how bad that sounded.

“No! Not a mistake. Just . . .” He struggled to find a word that meant ‘mistake’ without implying that he never wanted it to happen again. “An accident.” He frowned. That wasn’t any better. “Not an accident, either. I meant to, er, do what I did — what _we_ did, but I demonstrated poor judgment, and for that I apologize.”

“OK.” She nodded and licked her lips. “Would you rather be my mistake, my accident, or my demonstration of poor judgment, since I was the one who kissed you? Right now you could be all three.”

Deret nearly choked on his own breath.

“Rust it, that is not what I meant, Mirel. You aren’t any of those things.”

“Then you should say what you mean, not —” She lifted one hand and waved it at him.

“I try,” he said, “there’s just something about you that makes the wrong thing come out, and I don’t know why.” He scrubbed at the stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave that morning. “Ancestors, that’s not what I mean, either. It’s me, not you.”

“Mancrest, your office does not have a door,” she said quietly after a tense pause, and Deret became aware that several sets of eyes were fixed on them, watching whatever it was that was going on between them play itself out. When he looked around, the entire newsroom was suddenly transfixed by their desktops. And quiet. They had been for some time, he realized.

“You all have deadlines,” he said in a carrying voice. “Get back to work.”

In the ensuing flutter and stir of papers, he turned back to Mirel, who looked even more tired and drawn than before. He felt sick. He didn’t want to be responsible for that. How did he keep ending up back here? Words were how he made his living — he didn’t have a problem with clear language when it came to the news. Only with women, and this one in particular.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked, dropping his voice so no one else could hear.

Mirel released a soft sigh.

“Why would I want to go home? It’s not even ten,” she whispered back.

“Because you’re exhausted from yesterday and you shouldn’t have to look at me for at least twenty-four hours.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“I don’t need to run away from you.” She snagged her coffee cup off his desk, where she had set it earlier. “I need more coffee. Did you have anything else you needed to talk to me about? Something work related, maybe?”

He shook his head slowly.

“No, just stick with your assignments. The follow-up on the warehouse fires is yours. I trust your judgment. You know what you’re about.” He tensed his hand on the armrest of his chair so he wouldn’t reach out to her. “I am sorry, Mirel.”

Her mouth turned down at the corners, and she blinked rapidly.

“Listening to apologies gets old, Deret,” she said. “Remember that.”

Deret watched her walk away, and then watched Lirial and one of the advertising staff follow her into the kitchen, no doubt to ply her with questions about what had just happened. That last pretty much killed any thought he had of going after her. By the end of the day, everyone at the _Gazette_ and the _Imperial Standard_ , if not the entirety of Stumps, would know that there was something unprofessional occurring between himself and Mirel. He hoped — he didn’t know what he hoped or what he knew. Only that making apologies got old, too, but he couldn’t see himself stopping until he managed to do it right.

He snorted and snagged a story one of the reporters had given him to critique during the writers meeting. Maybe he should just have an apology printed in the society pages. They could start a new column between the wedding announcements and the birth announcements — apologies and pleas. That would sell papers, too. He couldn’t be the only one with this problem.


	6. Chapter 6

"Well, what do you know," Maldynado said as he read the headline on the newspaper Books held in front of his face. "Mancrest really did run the story."

"You mean you knew this was coming and didn't think to warn anybody? Nobody on the team?" Books shook the paper meaningfully.

Maldynado shrugged and reclined further in the armchair he was sitting in. He had been relaxing after breakfast in the parlor the team had unofficially claimed as theirs, waiting for Yara to turn up after her morning workout, when Books and Basilard had intruded on him. 

"What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, Amaranthe, I know you and Sicarius aren’t here, and I’m talking to an empty room, but the perfectly marriageable man I introduced you to showed up to interview me about whether or not your freaky shadow really married you in secret.'" He made a sour face. "As if Sicarius could ever do anything that romantic. I doubt he has the creativity to even buy flowers, and that's kid stuff."

Books's gaze was positively censurious.

"I am once again astounded by your lack of awareness for the people around you, as well as your belief that you can't be romantic without first buying a woman flowers, as if relationships were a board game with stages you must progress through."

"Booksie," Mal said with mocking disapproval, "did you really never buy your wife flowers?"

"She preferred chocolates," Books sniffed.

Basilard interrupted their bickering by stabbing a finger at the paper Books still held out and signing, _Amaranthe isn't going to like this._

Both men transferred the attention to what Basilard pointed at. Maldynado cocked his head to the side and let his mouth drop open, but Books spoke first.

"That artist's recreation," he said slowly. "Amaranthe looks . . ."

"Nauseous," Mal finished for him. "Or concussed. Or maybe drunk." He paused, considering something. "You don't think they were drunk, do you? I mean, if this actually happened. The documents were probably forgeries, and this is all a big hoax."

 _Neither of them would wander the city intoxicated._ Basilard grimaced and then recanted, signing, _Amaranthe, maybe._

"I really don't think Sicarius would ply Amaranthe with alcohol and then ask her to break into the licensing hall with him," Books said. "Remember when we celebrated the toppling of Forge and Amaranthe celebrated a little too much? He was not best pleased."

The room grew quiet as all three men remembered that night. It had . . . revealed sides to the boss's character that perhaps even she had not known existed. They certainly hadn't.

"She's a happy drunk, not a tractable one," Books said, summarizing everyone's thoughts. As the only sober members present for the occurrence, he and Sicarius probably knew this better than anyone else, as they were the ones who had had to deal with Amaranthe. "There is no making Amaranthe do anything she does not want." He cleared his throat. "And more importantly, he would not force her."

Basilard nodded in agreement, and Mal felt like both of them had suddenly stepped into another reality and dragged him along.

“He makes her do things she doesn’t want to all . . .” He trailed off as he realized how wrong that was. Sicarius made him do things he didn’t want to all the time, but Amaranthe made Sicarius do things Sicarius didn’t want to with shocking regularity. A worm of doubt began to nibble at his apple of certainty.

Akstyr came shambling into the room, headed for the corner table he had claimed as his own for studying his books on the mental sciences. He walked past them and then backed up several steps when he caught sight of their faces.

“What’s going on?” he asked. Books turned the paper so he could see. His upper lip twisted with confusion. “I thought Mancrest was gonna stop printing lies about us in that rag of his.”

 _I don’t think they’re lies,_ Basilard signed. _Sicarius seemed nervous when he told me we would have these days off._ He grinned widely and winked. _I wondered why we got the break, but it all makes sense now. They snuck off together._

“How does it make sense?” Akstyr demanded. “Am’ranthe’s nice. She wouldn’t —” he made a gesture that could possibly be obscene, but was mostly vague “—with Sicarius. Ever.”

“See?” Mal waved toward Akstyr. “At last someone understands the situation better than you two.”

Books snorted derisively.

“Your argument is not furthered by someone who cannot say that two adults might have coitus and must rely upon gestures.”

“As if gestures are any worse than ‘have coitus,’” Maldynado said, ignoring the disgruntled look that appeared on Akstyr’s face at Books’s comment. “There are about a million better ways of saying it than _that.”_

A look of triumph lit up Books’s eyes.

“Oh?” he asked mildly. “Such as ‘spelunking in her cave?’”

Maldynado groaned. Was he never going to live that moment down? His Evi had forgiven him months ago, but these fellows wouldn’t let it go. Akstyr and Basilard were smirking at him, even now.

His lady chose that moment to enter the room, and the smirks turned into snickers. Even Books lacked the dignity to keep a straight face. Beneath hair still damp from bathing, her face snapped into a familiar expression of suspicion. It was aimed solely at Maldynado.

“What did you _say?”_ she growled.

He resisted the urge to greet her with “hello, grouch”, which had long since become an endearment between them, but would not be welcome under the circumstances.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said, holding his hands up. “It was these other fellows who decided to have fun at my expense.”

“Uh huh.” Evi wasn’t having it. She folded her beautifully toned arms, displayed to perfection in the sleeveless tunic he had bought her, across her chest.

“No, really. I’m the innocent one here. I didn’t say anything about you.” His protests weren’t gaining him any sympathy, so he decided to divert the topic to one which didn’t involve any perceived offenses against his lady. “Deret says Amaranthe got hitched. To Sicarius.”

Evi’s face softened into confusion and she dropped her arms.

“Deret says what?”

Books handed her the paper, and she read it over with a little frown between her eyebrows, which disappeared when she looked at the engraving and one brow rose in the air.

“Hmm.” She handed the paper back to Books. “I thought those two had something going on.”

“Not you, too, sweetheart,” Maldynado said despairingly. Evrial put her fists on her hips and turned her raised eyebrow on him.

“Don’t tell me that you, Lord Lovecrest, didn’t see any sign of a relationship between those two, after all the time you spent with them. ”

“Lord Lovecrest,” Books repeated in tones of delight, probably wondering why he hadn’t thought of it himself before this.

"There you all are," came Amaranthe's voice from the doorway. “There’s something Sicarius and I have to tell you.”

Sicarius lurked behind her, his usual flat expression in place. She came into the room and he followed, his face hardening further as he took in the group gathered around the newspaper. There was something different about him, and it took Maldynado a moment to figure out what it was. When he did, the truth hit home like a crossbow bolt to the brain.

“Emperor’s buttocks!” He shot to his feet, finger rising of its own volition to stab at Sicarius. “Your hair. It’s tidy.” He scowled at Sicarius, whose expression had only grown colder. “What did you do to her, you scoundrel?”


End file.
